Statement
Through painting, I seek to complicate or interrupt the viewer’s process of apprehending an image, often through the displacement of traditional subjects and methods.
Much of my work investigates historical methods of representation in paintings and their relationship to perception. I’ve developed multiple series of work to explore, from different angles, the conventions and assumptions behind the act of depiction. The attempt to “capture” an object in space in an image is as contingent on how we see the subject as it is on the properties of the object as a thing separate from the viewer. Traditional genres (still lives, landscapes, flower paintings, etc.) and modern responses to them comprise conceptual frameworks that mean to define what it is to see something, and what it is to be a thing. I feel that painting has special access to this history of depiction, as seen in the work of Leslie Vance, Morandi, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and William Daniels. Through all my work, I want to push back through this history, break it apart a little, and look at the inner workings of how we see a picture.