As an artist I find my practice to mostly revolve around painting and the making of small objects, that depict a blurred memory, that is meant to serve as a metaphor for a disconnect to the past. I work directly with my own memories, deconstructing them and distorting them as a means to reevaluate the fantasies that are created by a time passed. I work mostly by translating old unfamiliar photographs into paintings, and then I disrupt them, with no regard to the preciousness of the paintings I create with various materials such as; wax, enamel, crayon, marker, exc. The playful gesture of crossing or blocking someone or something out is the strategy I use to evoke a discomfort to a situation, in order to have the viewer reevaluate what they are presented with.
My current work deals, directly with my relationship with my father, who has been more then less an alien figure to my life. Causing nothing more then an eerie unfamiliar anxiety, which is evoked by my recent introduction to him. In my work I attempt to trigger these feelings of anxiety and discomfort, as well as to deconstruct my own fantasies I have created around him in not knowing him. In a more relatable sense, my work is about the ignorance toward direct influence on your life by admiring the fantasy revolving around the unfamiliar. The work itself is a series of paintings, photographs and drawings, in which the source material is old photographs of me and my father that I have manipulated in a gestural playful manner.
This is relatable to my past work, in the sense that it is pulling on the ideas of creating contrast between the object existing and not existing (in my recent works the object being my father). In my past works I have been interested in the idea’s of not having something that is so regularly used, and what happens when an object is replaced by the idea of or lack of an object. Essentially my ideas strip the materiality of object and take away that convenience it provides by existing. I feel that this practice is in a sense an attempt to move beyond the illusions and fantasies I’ve created around life, to better understand my own relationship to the world.
Although my work finds itself taking about issues of discomfort, displacement, and removal, I like to think of my practice as a relatively playful one, in which I am constantly forcing myself to reevaluate my position on things. My practice is just myself trying to understand the things that are unfamiliar to me through the tactile approach of making art objects.