STATEMENT

My work explores the mind/body split that is intrinsic to the human experience as intellectual animals, a split that has been fundamental to both human discontent and to human dynamism throughout history. As a species, we have always felt awkward in our bodies; Almost every major religion addresses the tending to, and the control of, the body: The massive issues and power of the pharmaceutical industry testify to our obsession with the vagaries and deterioration of the body; the legislative struggles of race, reproduction, and gender again deal with the social attempts to control the body. All of these struggles within our grand institutions are magnifications of the struggles within the individual, the lifelong struggle to resolve thought and emotion with the limitations of our corporeal selves. In the case of figurative artists, this mind/body struggle becomes not only the means of their work, but also the topic of their work. For me, this struggle also serves as my primary inspiration.

This work deals with the vulnerability of the human body. These pieces explore the horror and the humor of attempting to control a fragile and continually deteriorating corporeal form. My figurative works use bodily metaphor to describe cultural and psychological experience. The permeability of the skin to environmental nutrients and contaminants echoes the susceptibility of the individual to the nutrients and contaminants of cultural ideas, of prejudices and politics, of consumerism and fear. To this ends, I use underlying textures in my paintings that resemble the movement of fluids, or the surfaces of skin, tissues. The paintings’ surfaces have a living, animal quality in the gestural buildup of underlying mediums. In addition, the figures themselves wrestle with the nature of their skin, biting and pulling it, and struggling with its limitations.

As a figurative painter, I express the awkwardness of the human form. My figures are uncomfortable in their skins, in their environments, and seem vulnerable to the spaces and symbols that surround them. Often the individuals in my work are surrounded by, or incorporated with, animal forms; these forms remind us of the animal, biological nature of our human selves. Often these animals are tied, leashed, or suspended, suggesting elements in our own make-ups, and issues in our own psyches, to which we are inescapably bound.