Statement

I strive to shed light on a pervasive but repressed world view as it relates to figurative imagery. Western painting history for centuries canonized a particular perspective from which otherness was defined, and by extension how the world was categorized. My paintings work to problematize what is comfortable about the assumptive nature of those categorizations, especially as they relate to the politics of the figure.

The figures are exclusively white, and now come from life, where once they were of appropriations the world of fashion advertising. The latter interests me in that their primary function is as implicit salesmen, often selling things that are intangible and incapable of being purchased. The former is in effect taking a model that represents some culturally ingrained ideal, and turning them into a sort of talisman of canonical drives, which always in some form employ notions of power and class. I find it interesting that the choice of figure becomes a politicized action, and that it has lasting effects on how the art is viewed before and after a biography is known. But it is that shift in meaning, in connotations, and in the fact that there is a shift at all, that is the central drive of this body of work.