Subversion & Commemoration

I work with paint, canvas, photoshop, and photography to create installations and individual pieces that blend the genres of painting and conceptual art. Two oppositional philosophical objectives guide my practice. The first is to undermineand complicate conventions, and the second,to enter traditional systems, often viewed as correct to the point beyond reproach by their founding hegemonic culture, thusintroducingnuance. I aim to point at the bias and blind spots of convention and canon, revealing the extent to which they are still in need of refinement. My work could be classified as postmodern for this reason—it looks back at art history, particularly the genre of painting, and echoes them with a critical edge. I deploy self-reflexivity, irony, and parody as tools of reimagination and critique. In the exhibitions The Artist is Presentand Placed / Misplaced, I have attempted to add to the aesthetic vocabulary of painting while challenging its conventions. The Artist is Presentasksquestions about what it means to make material art in a digital age, situating material work alongside digital counterparts presented via wall-mounted iPhones. Placed / Misplacedinterrogates the conventional placement of paint and canvas within the gallery context and displays three atypical arrangements of these two traditional painting features. The second objective, held in tension with the first, is to create art that resonates with ideas and narratives that lead to human flourishing. I have encountered art that made me feel existentially full, less alone, like someone just shot a flare that’s lighting the dark path forward. I believe art ought to be wielded as a force of redemption just as it is wielded as a force of revision. The Center Must Holdis an attempt to fulfill this second philosophical objective in its visualization of the American two-party political system. The exhibition aims to highlight the importance and growing fragility of individualism in an increasingly polarized political system.
I hope accurately outlines the structure of the two-party political system, provides viewerswith a non-partisan aid for thinking critically about our political moment and commemorates the value of individualism. My creative goal is to get viewers to look more closely at,or think more deeply about,something worth their attention for critical and redemptive purposes. I am interested in creating art that explores the space between subversion and commemoration, between skepticism and belief. This invites the question, “Which ideas ought to be subverted and which should be commemorated?”While I do not think a general rule can sort ideas into these two categories, I believe finding the answer requires holding a dialectical tension between pairs of opposingconcepts. Past and future, irony and sincerity, cynicism and sappiness, clarity and mystery, conservation and progress: the way forward artistically is to never land on one side or the other of these pairs, but rather to live in the tension between them, applying one or the other circumstantially.