Born 1980 in Winterhaven (FL), lives Los Angeles (CA)
Artist Statement
My most recent body of work strives to evoke the feeling of adventure and play through memory, fiction and dreamlike states. Theses paintings rely on kitsch elements combined with painterly gestures to create images that are simultaneously cynical and optimistic, attractive and repulsive, beautiful and ugly. My attraction to the people, animals and landscape pictures I re-appropriate comes from a desire to remake an image into a space that relates to classic American tropes, fantasy and dreams. The prints that I cut up usually consist of American iconography, i.e., rodeos, palm trees, dirt biking, surfing, etc., and almost always come from pictures that I find on the internet. I select images that seem to lack the psychological charge that I desire. This need to reconfigure found images drives my pictorial interventions.
Using an array of materials and different types of saws, I cut into the surface of a print, that is stacked upon layers of glued cardboard, mount it onto a plywood frame. The image is then painted over. Doing this to pictures creates a sense of absence, compositional dynamism and greater dimensionality. Excavating pictures made of cardboard and faded ink allows me the opportunity to transform these reproductions into images that partake of both the everyday and the fantastic.
My reworking of reproduced pictures often obscures the nature of the original referent and leaves the viewer in a state of miscomprehension or awe. By trafficking in kitsch source material my images play with pictures from the collective unconscious and mix mechanical reproduction with the virtuosity of painterly effects. The appropriated parts function as a grounding device from which the picture evolves. Much like a stage set, popular images are integral to setting the scene – by exhibiting qualities that are both familiar and mundane, they act as an entry point into the work. For me, found materials frame a space where transformation can take place, where the appropriated becomes subordinated to a new feeling of otherworldliness. In these works cardboard, industrial printing and glue take on a different sense of materiality with the addition of select areas of painterliness, transparent glazes and additional alterations to both surface and support. I am constantly calling into question the conventions of painting and sculpture in the hope of renewing the mysteries of pictorial invention.