My work is an exploration of themes combining various influences from popular, sacred and historical culture. From these influences I create a personal mythology of allegorical characters designed to critique and question the hierarchical status quo of our society, the conflicts between religious belief and rationality, and the mythologies our culture is built upon. Visually, I construct my work to resemble an amalgamation of the cartoons and art historical influences of a youth spent alternately in front of a television set and wandering the LA County Museum of Art with my mom and brother. Using gouache or enamel on paper and canvas, and a meticulous masking process, I endeavor to recreate the flat, seductive appearance of a cartoon cell married with compositional and contextual relationships reminiscent of medieval painting. By combining these disparate aesthetic devices, I hope to expand a little further the dialectal borders of painting and drawing for those of us who experienced our first tastes of visual culture in Technicolor motion. In my most recent narrative, religious
figures rise and fall, parents discard their children for faith, and a
forsaken daughter is reunited with her brother (who may or may not be
a figment of her imagination). The repetitive collision of ideologies
is a source of unending conflict in our civilization and fertilizer for
many of my projects. The protagonist for this series is the character
of the “Sister” who personifies a conflicting heritage of
repressive religious zealotry and an often diametrically opposed, freewheeling
search for meaning familiar to many of us. Her longing to reunite with
the family that discarded her, and her belief in a potentially chimerical
twin is emblematic of a larger contemporary desire for the cultural reconciliation
and nurturing familial relationships that always seem just that tiny bit
too quixotic to ever be fully realized.
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