Specious Painting

My work explores the limits of the visual language created to reify that which is troublesome to depict and thus dependent on illustration. The symbiotic relation or fusion of environment and figure, the passage of time, and the glow of light suggesting celestial intervention. I discovered complex configurations of space within cartoons long before I learned about cubism. Fights are depicted in tumbleweed like formations of swirling fists, feet and occasional bottles and scale relationships are secondary. I’m fascinated in the visual leap of faith that is required to process such visuals. My work emerges from a collage method of thinking where the backside of cut silhouettes might reveal unexpected and illuminating visuals within a planned shape. I’m interested in capturing the complex layers of underlying information that a thin slice through reality reveals. My work traverses the visual vestiges of an imposed collective consciousness in search of meaning, unity or at least overlap. I want to use the slippery quality attached to the language of advertisement that seems to expire the moment it's produced. My landscapes and figures dwell within that rich aftermath; reproducing and reconfiguring to create alternate environments with re-contextualized echoes of the vaguely familiar. Weaving together watercolor washes, acrylic, graphite and oil, I strive to create layers that defy space and create a sense of architectural impossibility. I construct Images and narratives derived from a psychotic reality that has lost visual coherence. By working in a collage fashion I utilize fragments of things that are familiar to others and attempt to combine them to construct themes and narratives that explore our own alienation to the worlds and environments that we have actively participated in constructing. My work explores the psychedelic mass of seemingly available and inexhaustible visuals and histories. I'm fascinated in our shared visual lexicon and it's state of continuous construction that becomes denser and more impenetrable through constant development, re-visitation and re-appropriation. I see excitement in such traces because they simultaneously offer universality, superficiality, and an underlying sense of truth. I'm drawn to the loaded quality of such imagery and want to leave elements of it within my work, ghosts that cannot be predicted nor controlled because the plethora of histories, references and connotations could never be covered. The crime scene that yields mismatched fragments or clues within the wreckage of a collapsed building.