STATEMENT OF WORK

My work  investigates our historical moment as it takes place through online communities and digital spaces. Often temporal and vulnerable to censorship and erasure, my work memorializes online phenomena by transforming them into artifacts, through the tradition of painting. My project is concerned with mimesis, conspiracy, and history, as they unfold online, and how they might be reified in the ever-changing “real world”.

Digital images and artifacts feel like precious and venerable clues, an ode to the mystery.. They  contain meaning, but to fit into a narrative or story they must be further investigated  and oriented through writing. They begin as phenomena, then are translated into artifacts/objects which contain meaning. But what is the next step? The meaning has to be utilized, their power has to be put to use. I hope to unite disparate images and ideas by giving them a story, through the art of painting, using historical techniques and methods, and style which is referential to some of the most renowned, and recognizable painters. 

Deeply informed by the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, using digital, cultural, and online content to interrogate Benjamin’s idea of aura, or the soul contained by art. Research and engagement with online communities and content yields my source material; images which reflect cultural and societal conditions. Working in oils and occasionally acrylics, my project memorializes degraded images into paintings,  attempting to imbue them with aura. It is this transformation that revives an image’s energy, its purpose to derive feeling from the viewer.