Artist's Statement
I depict an illusionistic canvas on real canvas, a doubling of the object we call a "painting ". The ground becomes a vertical field, an arena without perspective on which abstracted images, improvised primarily from an inventory of modernist painting and popular culture, interact. In some paintings, these typologies "press" into the field, impacting its surface and each other. In others, the forms exist on the periphery, appearing to exist in front of, or behind, the ground. The shifting hierarchy between field and figure, illusion and flatness, triggers an awareness of the pleasures of disorienting visual experiences, which lie in the collision between what we see, and what we assume we are seeing. Disrupting our expectations creates a suspension, a shift of attention, which opens us to a more nuanced, poetic aspect of awareness, usually overlooked in the exigencies of the everyday. It's my hope that the work goes beyond the discourse of painting to resonate with the pathos and humor of living.
While beginning this work, I came across an essay by Jean Baudrillard,
from 1987, entitled "The Trompe L'Oeil," which resonated conceptually
with the paintings I was making and led me to look again at American 19th
century trompe l'oeil painters such as William Hartnett and John F. Peto.
100 years ago, they created tongue and cheek, but often elegiac paintings
of the detritus of culture. This genre of painting, situating itself uneasily
between popular culture, fine art, and the commercialism supporting it,
speaks to the state of painting as anti-painting in the twenty first century.
Underneath the superficial cognitive pleasure that trompe l'oeil offers,
is in Peto's painting, a deeply personal and poignant relationship to the
culture of his time. Peto grew up during the 1870's, in a time of political
corruption, national loss of innocence, growing complexity and cynicism,
as well as an unbridled accumulation of wealth and consumption. One hundred
years later, I experienced similar personal, social and political events-
for Peto it was slavery, the Civil War, and Lincoln's assassination- for
me, it was the civil rights movement, Viet Nam, and Kennedy's assassination.
The parallels evoked an eerie resonance between his life as an artist and
mine, with conflicting urges to both transcend a chaotic and duplicitous
world and mournfully, sometimes humorously, describe it.
To this end, I have begun conflating the visual forms embodying these polemic
postures, substituting the "letter rack" with copies of paintings
from early modernist abstract painters like Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian,
who were working just a few years later than Peto. I use these twentieth
century paintings-which aspire to a transcendental, utopian purity- as
a receptacle for the detritus of a personal and public postmodern hodge-podge
that has dismantled any hope for belief in such ideas. This recycling of
iconic Modernist masterpieces into modern day bulletin boards honors and
mourns the modernist spiritual project. Carrying a personal narrative,
these paintings also contribute a cultural and political critique--revealing
the ethical and visual bankruptcy present in our media manipulated "reality
show" ethos, which sadly refers to George Burn's wisecrack, "If
you can fake sincerity, you've got it made."
The paintings suggest the possibility that the sublime may be located only in the overlooked and the everyday-- the torn ticket that says, "admit one".