Biography
EZRA THOMPSON artist statement
My paintings examine motive and identity within the American media apparatus.
By forfeiting my own image, my portraits explore the dynamics between spectacle and spectator, the powerful and the powerless, the believer and non-believer. The paintings are both collective and private fantasies that are highly critical of our social complacency. Each composition gives the appearance that nothing is out of place. Like a collage these absurd realms easily accommodate one another into a single picture plane.
Out of my appropriation of American consumerism and Christian mythology I explore the idea of redemption as it relates to both personal and societal moral crises. Using beauty as a lure, I rework the traditional pictorial language of good and evil to a different end.
EZRA THOMPSON completed his BFA at the Cooper Union in New York City where he studied with notable professors Hans Haacke and Dore Ashton. Under the tutelage of the late Dr. Hugh J. Silverman, his graduate project at Stony Brook University focused primarily on the Self-Portrait, Narcissism, and the Other. He has lived and worked in Berlin, Copenhagen and Tokyo. He currently lives and works in Eastern Long Island, New York.
