Artist Statement
Urban scenes, working class automobiles and mangled images. The subject matter of my paintings and drawings are often represented by middle class objects from my past, fragmented vertigo images, skewed diagonals and agitated environments and objects. I find industrial environments and deteriorating automobiles to have a disguised beauty and I continue to find great interest in uncovering their details. I often use inviting, vibrant colors to represent images and then place them in imagined pseudo-industrial landscapes and environments. By marrying the automobiles with my created spaces, I seek to have viewers re-evaluate what they define as beautiful. My jewelry design incorporates these same concepts to create three-dimensional objects through all available metalsmithing techniques.
The beginnings of my mature body of work developed from the notion of “nostalgia.” Nostalgia continues to be an element of my work. However, it has developed and evolved from an “ideal” view of the past into a mechanism for social criticism regarding what is considered acceptable versus “unacceptable beauty”. I have combined these two concepts in order to draw attention to the misconception of the “American Dream”. The people and places in my childhood portrayed the “Dream” as a narrow path that was the only way to achieve social normalcy and happiness. Unfortunately, this isolates many other cultures, lifestyles, and social values by denoting them as unacceptable, as they may be opposed to the “American Dream”. An awareness of this potential opposition to the erroneous social mores of my childhood will hopefully cause willingness in the viewer to continue re-evaluate his or her own direction. By looking outside the social norm and accepting values differing from his or her own as being equally valid, one can accept as beautiful unconventional images and forms within my art.
Rather than discarding the past utility driven design innovations for the materialistic, consumerism-driven, fashionable new look, I wish to examine and discover the intellect and excitement that once inspired an original creation. Often times the development of a structure’s design reveals a beauty born out of a combination of primitive shapes. These combinations reveal their foundations, whether intentional or unintentional, and serve as inspiration for the creation of my own art. The shapes create an unexpected structure, which I eagerly manipulate and combine with other primitive shapes to create my own environments that incorporate the past but live in the current cultural generation. Through this process, I seek to create an engaging dynamic composition where the viewer can experience and discover new, authentic structures with a contemporary perspective that can pay homage to the original.