STATEMENT OF WORK

I make painting-oriented objects that recall forms either prosaic in their proximity to my mortal life or mythical in their distance from it. These manifest as utilitarian forms like ladders, bedframes, and chairs on one end, and worship forms like Catholic church apses, ancient Greek Hermae, and illuminated manuscripts on the other. I reimagine these forms as painting-sized museums, or Wunderkammers: elaborate coffins containing simulacra of themselves and, when grouped, acting as cemeteries for their collective cultural lives. All of these forms both invite and deny their original functions. Sometimes this is done intentionally, by removing the utility from the objects (the chair cannot be sat on because it's been flattened, the ladder cannot be climbed because paintings fill the gaps between rungs), and sometimes it is a preexisting condition established by the cultural situation in which the form finds itself (A herma is not seen as apotropaic in this time and place, and, similarly, the apse of a church alludes to an all-seeing government surveillance eye more than Christ's ubiquitous love, or whatever). In this way, the forms become merely symbols, or specters, of ritual-cultural objects, which is in fact all they can be in our political and social environment—the evidence of this desublimation can be seen in all aspects of our daily life, from Hot Topic's consumerist grip on transgression to ICE raids separating children from their parents, enacted by an allegedly families-first, moral-values focused political party. 

While I want my work to address its own spiritual impotence, I do dream of a society in which we can commune with our metaphysical world effectively, without the baggage and hegemony of organized religion on the conservative side or the performative "sprituality" on the neo-hippie, pseudo-leftist side. I would like to continue the world while also attempting to describe it. We must do both, because neither cause and effect nor interiority and exteriority move unilaterally. I'm not interested in this because I am religious or spiritual, but because capitalist culture has subsumed our entire aesthetic world. This world contains both art and spirituality, which I see as inextricably connected. I would like to contribute to a world in which they can escape this purgatory of being-on-display. As Mark Fisher says, "A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all."