Through painting, my work documents the chaos and anxiety of being lost in the internet era, and the poignancy of trying to find oneself amid infinite other lives, sights, and thoughts.
Referencing symbols as diverse as cartoons, personal iPhone snapshots, memes, other artworks, eBay listings, and other peculiar images typically unearthed during a late night web-surf; the paintings search for subjective perspective within the cracks of contemporary visual culture. The crux of my practice is exploring the dichotomy between the personal and the globally networked. This dichotomy is amplified by juxtaposing cold, fast, contemporary digital sensibility with the ultimate timelessness and materiality of painting.
My paintings are efforts to process and link stimuli, re-piecing digital segments into organic, digestible compositions. They seek to clarify the dense, urgent visual information that floods our daily experience – the paintings are in part personal therapy, in part suggestion of a way to keep one’s head above water. In the same way, my text work looks to clarify complex and oscillating emotions and thoughts. To this effect I seek to understand both my external and internal worlds, grappling with the nebulous and infinite – an act constantly teetering on the edge of impossibility.
At the core of my practice is a deep affection for human fallibility. A counterpoint to the trope of contemporary art as hypercritical, ironic and emotionally evasive, my work is apropos of vulnerability, uncertainty, anxiety, and honesty. We often fail to comprehend things bigger than ourselves - in an era under capitalism, embedded with deep structural inequality and overwhelming plurality, allowing ourselves moments to acknowledge feelings of floundering, ridiculous confusion is bolstering and rare. I’m interested in how painting can be used to represent the discomfort of being overwhelmed. Scungy marks, cheap materials, poorly-made and awkwardly integrated sculptural aspects, muddy, clashing colours – I deliberate aestheticize mistakes to draw attention to the importance of their role in the world.
My work is informed by artists whose work also revolves around emotional candour, in varying forms. Two different strands of artists emerge from my influences: strong, expressive women who often use text to express vulnerability – Jenny Watson, Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin, and Jenny Holzer; and male artists who use stylistic faux-naivety to discuss the same themes of vulnerability and failure in a formal sense – Tom Polo, Torey Thornton, and Richard Lewer.
Though my practice is concerned with layers of cultural relativity and painting theory within the expanded field, its core focus is simple and intuitive. How do we make sense of the world? How can we contend with complex, boundless ideas and still keep getting out of bed every morning? Through my work I hope to find if not answers then clues to these impenetrable questions. I seek to reconcile and digest the chaos of contemporary pluralized, imaged existence: to carve a way of comprehending what a personal, subjective life is like now under the conditions of the omnipresent screen.
