Artist's Statement
Millennial disillusion isn’t as depressing a muse as one would probably think. Though initial readings of my work tend to oscillate between desperation, resignation, confusion, and fear, the pieces are intended to transcend those surface readings revealing webs of beauty, humor, desire, power, sadness, disappointment, hope…the messy jumble that is being human. I build up moments of strange poignancy by populating my work with frumpy, middle-aged, middleclass people mid-coitus in architecturally significant houses, corporate CEOs leering out of porn sets, and figures ripped from homey interiors, replaced with whole spinal racks of sawed-off beef ribs. The bizarreness of these pieces is an effort to disassociate the viewer just enough to permit a moment of intimate reflection.
I have spent the last three years working for Colliers International in institutional investment sales helping banks unravel the mess of the real estate market collapse one property at a time. Years of attempting to mitigate damage to multi-billion dollar corporations’ balance sheets have led me to develop an art practice that considers the importance of the things we invest: money, emotion, time and trust; the things we invest in: ideas, ventures, ourselves, and others; and the reality that these investments are all susceptible to failure.
In addition to my time at Colliers, my work is heavily influenced by my experiences living in Singapore during college. The galvanizing cultural contrasts I observed there focused my work on delving into identity as an implicitly collaborative performance between self and other; a network of gaze and returned gaze; an ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between [self] perception, people, place, and politics. I paint and collage as a literal means of manipulating the message of the media and the media of the message, a sampling process that consciously provokes discussion of copyright and artistic authorship. By splicing vintage fashion, art, business and pornographic magazines with contemporary media I build art works that challenge social assumptions by exposing how they are complicated, contrived, and vulnerable to collapse. Pornography performs deliberate functions in my work as a “common denominator” across socioeconomic strata, a means of discussing implicit versus explicit, and the intensity of and need for shared human experience…and the capitalization thereof.
I have spent the last three years working for Colliers International in institutional investment sales helping banks unravel the mess of the real estate market collapse one property at a time. Years of attempting to mitigate damage to multi-billion dollar corporations’ balance sheets have led me to develop an art practice that considers the importance of the things we invest: money, emotion, time and trust; the things we invest in: ideas, ventures, ourselves, and others; and the reality that these investments are all susceptible to failure.
In addition to my time at Colliers, my work is heavily influenced by my experiences living in Singapore during college. The galvanizing cultural contrasts I observed there focused my work on delving into identity as an implicitly collaborative performance between self and other; a network of gaze and returned gaze; an ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between [self] perception, people, place, and politics. I paint and collage as a literal means of manipulating the message of the media and the media of the message, a sampling process that consciously provokes discussion of copyright and artistic authorship. By splicing vintage fashion, art, business and pornographic magazines with contemporary media I build art works that challenge social assumptions by exposing how they are complicated, contrived, and vulnerable to collapse. Pornography performs deliberate functions in my work as a “common denominator” across socioeconomic strata, a means of discussing implicit versus explicit, and the intensity of and need for shared human experience…and the capitalization thereof.
