Statement 2011
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Shreds of tenderness and honesty are grafted onto nihilistic romantic fantasies and alternate universes. Central to this is an impulse to pull towards (and from) the Western narrative tradition, yet with an aim towards emotional responses of amusement, horror, wonder and revulsion.
The most recent body of work represents a synthesis of previous and ongoing investments in digital media, sculpture, performance, and photo/video, resulting in a series of digital images (output as large scale photographic prints) which continue tendencies towards storytelling, though in a more fractured format before. Characters and settings reveal themselves in the images as if lost stills from a redacted film, although unlike cinema these figures and places are stranded in time without an apparent narrative to hold onto. A storyline is suggested, an experience is shaped and filtered, though a viewer is left with the displaced skeleton of a story rather than a fleshed out sequence of events. The images themselves are buried under washes of digital and analog noise, purposeful distortion which obscures the image further, yet simultaneously suggests movement, as if the images were captured brief glimpses from sources not meant for public consumption.
All of these characters and situations lie somewhere in between real world rationally and dramatized dystopia, between being threatening and being threatened, between laughter and the guilty feelings that sometimes follow. The viewer can be sympathetic, repulsed and implicated all at once. Sometimes rooted on current world events, sometimes rooted in future cataclysms, the work aims to suggest new narratives, however damaged, about people and their interaction to each other and the world itself, however concrete or fanciful.
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NYC 2011