Biography
My work aims to directly engage prevalent images of consumption drawn from our popular media culture, especially as they relate to gender, beauty, and material desire. Sources for these paintings include magazines such as, “House Beautiful”, “Better Homes and Gardens”, “Vogue”, “Cosmopolitan”, and “Glamour” to name a few. In assembling fragments from these sources into complex compositions and ultimately reconfiguring these images, I hope to stage an experience that calls into question the messages these media images perpetuate including the seemingly insatiable appetite for all to be happier, save more money, be more beautiful, appear more fashionable, and live in a more splendidly appointed environment.
Utilizing an array of samples, fragments, and graphic sensibility from these magazines, the resulting compositions are overloaded, complex, and not easily navigated. In this way my work aims to build a dense spatial network that offers a bounty of images for consumption.
Conceptually, the paintings aspire towards a similar density as the compositions do, locating themselves somewhere between the critique and the embrace, the humorous and the ponderous, and the colloquial and the formal. In using such a layered approach, I hope to create works that move at an oblique angle to the overly simplistic identity constructions that are found in many media images that I source. Like much work of our time, I aim to offer an intellectually reflective space by utilizing the very language of our visual and media dominated age.
