ARTIST STATEMENT

 

My paintings confront the relationship between our digital lives and our physical bodies. The work reckons with authenticity and performance of personality in a time of prolific image making and sharing online. The lines between the real and unreal at times become blurred when the internet plays a role in how we form our opinions of ourselves and of each other.

 

Distortion and the unreal play a large role in my narrative paintings. My figures are often unruly, awkward, and uncontainable. They carry their weight in their eyes, and their heads are larger than their torsos. They barely fit into the constraints of canvas, often lingering inches from the edge. Hands and eyes are blown out of proportion to the point of becoming clumsy and grotesque. I misuse proportion to draw attention to the unreal and to spotlight the psychological.

 

My artistic practice is heavily influenced by modern society and art history alike. My paintings are a contemporary ode to cubism, conflating motion and the still image with multiple viewpoints and timelines on the same plane. Instead of tackling motion from one source, like Picasso and Braque did, my references stem from images I am experiencing in everyday life, found online imagery, and the imagined. These ideas are at the root of my monstrous and sometimes grotesque painting language.

 

A parallel theme to performance of personality on the internet is the idea of the perceiver and the perceived. At times, the viewer is acknowledged as an active participant in the painting, such as in “Pasta Eaters II” where a fork-wielding hand is seen from the viewer's perspective. Sometimes the perceiver is personified negative space, or a ghostly anti-shadow, such as in “The Skater (figure as flight).”

 

My paintings use techniques such as distortion, surrealism, and collage to attempt to discern and magnify the dichotomy between authenticity and performance of personality on the internet when we all play the role of the consumer and the consumed.