STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings incorporate collaged photographs and source material pulled from news coverage and popular culture around themes of conspiracy, illusion and technological mediation, such as "The X-Files", "The Matrix" (1999) and "Wall Street" (1987). I digitally distort these source images and reproduce them on canvas utilizing pointillist techniques; often these images are layered over backgrounds that reference the history of modernist painting, such as a Moholy-Nagy painting or Husjar print, resulting in several layers of image that contradict or disrupt each other and leading to a painting that never quite coheres into something legible.

I am interested in pointillism and the post-impressionist movements more broadly for their density, their tension — caught between the subjective legacy of impressionism and a new 'objective' scientific approach to vision— as well as their continued legacy within aesthetic norms and expectations. Taking inspiration from Francis Picabia's later instrumentalization of impressionist painting as a 'stylistic readymade' in a series of paintings based on postcards, I use pointillist mark-making to reflect upon the degradation and dissemination of the image and the image of painting, to replicate the shimmering light effect of digital color and also to activate the painting's relationship to the viewer, who must build the image themselves by connecting the marks into a cohesive whole. 

I was drawn to the millennium-shifting film "The Matrix" in particular for its postulation of a literal code that generates reality, the 'source code' of representation, as well as many images of explosions that send 'debris' out at the viewer; I thought of this film as a structuralist joke and as an expression of the entanglement of the avant-gardist impulse with new technologies of seeing and structuring vision; many of my paintings layer images of that movie’s shrapnel of glass or code atop modernist forms or alongside post-impressionist landscapes; layering, essentially, various illusions as well as different timelines of making, representing and viewing. Similarly, "The X-Files" revolves around what can be seen and what can be believed: in my painting “Billionaire Yachting Death” the characters Scully and Mulder are embedded as pointillist dots, appearing transfixed by something beyond the borders of the canvas—a joke on painting’s reflexivity and a suggestion that this time, really, “The Truth is Out There”.

I find conspiracy reflexive to painting in terms of an individual artist’s practice (the recurrence of certain patterns and images in the artist's studio), their role in constructing a larger knowledge network (the crime board format in which you have Picabia, Pissarro, all these influences/connections floating around and the artist placing themselves on that board) but also within a painting as a nexus of connection/syntactic information. On a broad sense, the work suggests that the 'conspiratorial' mode of thought belongs to the history within painting of the redefinition and relocation of vision.

While my work presents webs of real and fictional connection and offers various levels of resolution, ultimately the paintings generate uncertainty between the image presented and what the viewer might take away as what that image means. I am interested in this gap and how it can destabilize or animate the relationship to the viewer of a painting, as well as how it might interrogate the role that 'content' plays within painting conventions, how meaning and value are produced by painting in a contemporary determined by financial markets and logics of financialization and speculation.