The culmination of my undergraduate exploration of painting has resulted in a body of work that aimed to arrest the audience, to create paintings that capture the attention and reaction of a public desensitized to images, flat images, paintings, and symbols have become devalued in our age of hyperproduction of images. In short, to make paintings that will be looked at for more than five seconds and stay in the mind of a bored twenty-first century audience.
Non-art art like patent drawings, the numbers on slot machines, captions on didactic drawings, etc. is an enduring fascination, both the aesthetics of them and the fact that these drawings function not as art but are art regardless. They have formal qualities that are unique to the form but can be borrowed for use in a fine arts context. A second dominant formal quality in the work is underground comics, and outsider art, much like the non-art art. I'm drawn to the intensely sincere quality in the work, which by definition is not beholden to trends in the art world and traditions in the fine arts. You can believe outsider art when its telling you it's a reflection of an artist's personal creative interests. The outsider art that my work references specifically is the simple line drawings and storytelling of something like Crumb or Krazy Kat, Bill Traylor etc.
The work in this body of work came entirely out of drawing, the process always began with precise graphite drawings on design vellum, the gridded paper provided an organization and precision to the drawings. When these were translated to paint, always on panel the precision dissolved and the sensuous experience of slapping on thick paint, deep brushstrokes thick tacky paint, what remained of the drawings was just the content. I draw/etch into the thick paint with the back of a brush or pencil thereby embedding drawing into the paint surface. The drawing component of my paintings is the aspect of the work that comes most directly from the aforementioned interests of patent drawings, utilitarian drawing, underground and outsider art etc.
The more explicitly “painted” elements of the work however dont have as clear an origin or influence as my drawing. The broad themes in my painting respond to body modification in all its forms, whether its a surgery or medical procedure, bodybuilding, costumes or the more expected forms of bodymod like tattos and piercings. This world came to me through a book I purchased in Japan about a subcultural event called Modcon where people with similar urges to transform themselves came together from around the world. The infamous urges and self surgery of Forrest Bess also found its place in my studio, an act by a painter that would not be out of place at Modcon. The idea of your body being imperfect or needing augmentation is a theme that is both relevant to our current cultural fascination with “identity” and a timeless idea of dissatisfaction with oneself, in a very real sense the urge to transform your costume, the body your given is a timeless struggle to feel comfortable in the world.
The aesthetics of the medical world are on display in the titular painting Standard Operating Procedure it features tools for spinal surgery who’s aesthetics fascinated me and the tools were in the studio during the whole preparation of the exhibition, much like the outsider art these tools seemed obscure, their function not obvious or well known like that of a hammer or wrench but a more specialized and obscure tool, but a tool nonetheless. I imagined if only I could make a big Lee Lozano tool painting depicting a tool for spinal taps rather than a hammer.
The sculpture piece made of tattooed silicone echo the minimalistic strangeness of Robert Gober and the Silicone head nailed to the wall I place as an homage to Gober’s sculpture and his work based on Forrest Bess at the 2012 Whitney Biennial