What is my work about?
My primary interest in art is making paintings. Paintings have the unique existence of being a flat surface and a framed view. I use stills from Disney movies which exploit this potential fully by superimposing very flatly painted characters onto highly rendered backgrounds. I see the work as a collaboration with the artists and animators who worked on the films as well as the people who meticulously capture them frame by frame and upload them to the internet. I see art as a social practice, and this collaboration allows me to not only engage with followers of art but also a wider range of people familiar with the subject matter I am working with.
Artist Statement
The subject, modes of representation, and degrees of abstraction have changed greatly since I first started painting, but the core ideas have remained the same in all the work. An underlying interest in the possibility of a painting to act as a portal to an imagined space or world, while never truly giving access to that world through the impenetrability of the surface. The inherent nature of painting having a dual existence, is what truly fascinates me. For a long time my paintings relied upon a self imposed fiction to create the allure of forms and spaces that gave the illusion of access. Recently I have found it more useful to borrow from well known fictions that already exist in our culture. Disney cartoons are perfect for this for many reasons. They provide an accessible spatial framework as well as a mental access through the use of widely known subject matter. Most of the images I use come from movies that depict fairy tales that were widely known before their adaptations into animation. Fairy tales are stories of fantasy which may resemble reality closely but could never be true. This is similar to the mimetic possibilities of painting, which are enchanting but merely an illusion. My arrival at the Disney imagery could be described as happenstance, through the sifting of content in social media platforms such as tumblr and instagram which are image heavy. I don’t see my work as being specifically nostalgic, but more of a reaction to the availability of content on the internet. Through this reaction the work becomes a dialogue and to an extant a collaborative effort.
I see the work as a collaboration with not only the artists and animators who worked at Disney, but also with the people who put the time and effort to upload thousands of screenshots of these movies on the internet. I find the majority of my reference material from a website that meticulously uploads every frame of every Disney movie. There is no real reason for this site to exist other than to aid in other peoples desires to use these images to create their own content on the internet, such as .gif’s and memes. My process begins by going through a given movie frame by frame. I try to find images that I feel can stand on their own, outside the original seriality of their context. Most importantly, I try to find images that would be interesting to paint. The interest comes from many things, such as the colors and compositions, but also the translation from jpeg to painting. The appropriation of images allows you to access colors and forms that you may have never considered before, things that are foreign to your learned style or preferences for image making. I catalogue many images that are of interest to me, and the next step is translating them on to a painting. I usually acquire the panels which I paint on without a specific image in mind. I then go through images I have chosen and try to find one that will benefit from a cropping to match the aspect ratio of the panel I have chosen. I feel that this action of framing is very specific to painting as seen as a “window”, but also relevant in today’s culture where the cropping of images is an everyday practice of individuals on social media. After the image is chosen and cropped I then proceed to draw it out from looking at my computer screen. This part of the process is important because it gives me time to familiarize myself with the composition and begin to think about how I want to paint it. The next step is the actual painting which is perhaps the hardest to describe. I try not to merely replicate the source material but make an interpretation of it. I do this by color choices, some are completely inverted, and paint application. The imagery can be manipulated to a great degree due to the recognizability of the subject matter. The viewer may come to the piece because of the familiar image, but then hopefully get lost in and question the unfamiliar.
CV
Education
2009 -2011, MFA, studio art, American University, Washington DC.
2001-2006. BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland Ohio.
Exhibitions
2014
Sunscreen. Graham Gallery, New York, NY.
Go With The Flow. The Hole, New York, NY.
If You’re Accidentally Not Included, Don’t Worry About It. Zurcher Studio, New York, NY.
2013
Eight Ball. Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA.
Acid Summer. DCKT, New York, NY.
Slow Hunch. Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York, NY.
White Wash. Brian Morris Gallery, New York, NY.
2012
XCentric.
Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA.
Conventional Wisdom. Delicious Spectacle, Washington DC.
Black Foliage. Nudashank Gallery, Baltimore, MD.
New Future. Circuit12 Contemporary, Dallas, TX.
Fearless Viewing. RK Projects, Providence, RI.
Potential Images. 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA.
Dream Continuum. Circuit12 Contemporary, Dallas, TX.
Spindles. Kinfolk Studios, Brooklyn, NY. Escape Velocity. Mirus Gallery. San Francisco, CA.
2011
Academy 2011. Connor Contemporary Art, Washington, DC.
Developmental Skills. Holtzman Gallery, Towson University, Towson, MD.
Out of Practice. Art Blog Art Blog, New York, NY.’;l
2010
CURVES. Nudashank Gallery, Baltimore MD.
Architectonic Dreams. Lawrence Asher Gallery, Los Angeles CA.
Academy 2010. Conner Contemporary Art, Washington DC.
2009
Picture Plane. Nudashank Gallery, Baltimore MD.
Publications
2012
AD BOOK. BFFA3AE. Badlands Unlimited. New York. NY.
2010
In The Modern World: Focus. Dwell Magazine. February 2010.
2009
Tangible: High Touch Visuals. Gestalten Press, Berlin.
New American Paintings #81.