STATEMENT OF WORK

As a painter, I create iconic images that can initially appear playful; yet it is a type of play that is hedonistic and nightmarish. My fictional female portraits draw inspiration from the worlds of stock photos, reality television, C-list celebrity culture and pornography. The distortions in my figures are meant to recall extreme plastic surgery, digital filters and Photoshopped bodies, along with the more primitive caricature found in Mad magazine or rubber Halloween masks. Backgrounds are taken from stock photos of idealized settings, nature, hell-scapes, or urban spaces. The uncanniness of the figures repeats here, although with a different visual logic; fish-eye distortion, shifts in color and desaturation further enhance the strangeness of the images and situate these women in some alternate dimension.
Together, a contemporary sort of ugliness is embraced and presented lovingly, and desire and fear are elicited in equal measure.

Beyond the figurative pieces, my work has also absorbed imagery from spam emails, Zillow listings for billion-dollar mansions, reality tv sets, and more. The common factor in these subjects is a distinctively contemporary American type of uncanniness, where an ideal clashes with reality. Photo transfers on my hand-built frames contextualize these images in the real world, making them both
hyper-specific and placeless. Further, through my labored surface treatment, subjects that are otherwise fleeting and marginal develop a soul. Rather than remaining in a niche, I’m interested in continually broadening my practice; among the included images is a Constable-inspired landscape. While the work is hyper-contemporary, it is also linked to art history in both its technical rigor and scale of ambition.