STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings and drawings recall the nuances of alienation in urban and suburban architecture, emphasizing physical and emotional distance. The rooms I paint are similar to apartments and homes I’ve stayed in, but the details belong to imagined lives, a kind of visual autofiction. They are fantasies about who I might be, ways to think through, for example, growing up gay in a christian home, urban isolation, loss and friendship.

By dividing pictures into grids and other alienating geometries, I create dissonance between feeling and form. The work is fundamentally motivated by emotion, but it is emotion extruded through abstract compositions, distorting the meanings of each work.

I’m exploring framing devices, considering how things like doors, windows and images within images can create a point of view in an imagined place, or an imagined personality. A frame implies both an object to be viewed and a hypothetical viewer seeing that object. Lenses such as glasses and windows reflect back on us, confusing the space between you and me. Who, for example, is wearing the glasses in “Your House?”

The consumer goods and architectural details in these scenes imply a larger infrastructure, while remaining enigmatic. Thus, a link is suggested between interpersonal estrangement and the ways industrial infrastructure organizes daily life. A slight suffocation is manufactured by rectangular clutter and the spatial conventions that order it. Rooms become proxies for moods. Nested geometries push and pull at believability, holding the viewer in an unstable immersion that feels true to life.