Artist's Statement 

If you are embarking on the journey that is reading my artist statement it is important to define for yourself what you are doing here and what you are looking for. Really, not to lay into you too much and potentially turn off any potential reader, but why would anyone read any artist statement at all? I try to, I frequently will find myself skimming gallery walls but really most of what I read or write feels pointless or immediately out of date. Now that I have started this statement in the worst possible way, I will try to get back on track. Throughout the psychobabble that is me attempting to define my work you have to come to terms with a couple of things. 

Art is a moving target. you are just blindfolded and tossing darts at an imaginary dart board and hoping you hit something that seems to summarize the whole of your existence. Foolish white men in the past used to follow the same exact process but think that they were trying to hit the whole of humanity's entire existence and sum it all up in some universal absolute truth. To put it as succinctly as I can, instead of capitalizing on the uniqueness of their situations they attempted to leverage the uniqueness of their situation and make it a statement about how no one is completely unique, that there is something that unites every human. This thought process never made sense to me, growing up even my siblings, as much as I love them, felt to be completely separate from me in their world views despite all of us being raised in the same environment.  This task is so much more impossible than the task i have set out to do, if I were to guess the odds, knowing that I am far far too low in my estimation, the chances of creating something that sums up all of human life, or maybe it's not just one thing even just creating a life full of artworks that sum up the entirety of human existence, would be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000(...etc) to 1. My task of defining just my own existence has much better odds, maybe like 1,000,000,000,000,000 (...etc) to 1. Maybe I will beat those odds, if I live long enough to truly process as much as I can, but even that seems futile. With a little help from my friends at least a little progress will be made. 

At this point I imagine most of you are asking how serious this all is, how real am I being. The bad news is I don't have an answer for you. The good news is I take almost nothing seriously so why would I take an artist statement seriously. That's also left up to you to decide. With this initial acknowledgment of implicit biases complete, and many of you either done reading or simply saying to yourself that I am really attempting to dodge the matter at hand, there are certain themes that surround my works and pop into the canvas when I stop thinking too hard about what I am doing. Many of these themes revolve around television.

I have an Oedipus complex with television. I simultaneously want to marry TV and also kill it. It’s what I think about in the morning when I wake up and right before my eyes close at night. TV raised me and TV is why I make art. 

In cartoons a character is nearly beaten to death and then is completely fine in the next scene. If only the world were a place with so few consequences. Cartoon violence is both impermanent and yet it is also permanent. All these television shows depicting people like Homer Simpson being thrown from cliff sides and punching their neighbors will long outlast my earthly body in both relevance and physicality. We are all near death at any given moment, whether it is a stab to the eye or a bonk on the head, we are out like a light. There is no use wringing your hands and grinding your teeth about it, but there is use in painting it. 

I treat my art practice like writing a sitcom. Each piece is a joke and combined they form an absurd series meant to create an irreverent realism. By taking commonplace imagery and skewing it, I make the familiar strange. I hate many things, but I hate thinking of my work as biographical most. That being said, myself is one thing I’ve never been able to escape from. I am a social chameleon, a mirror. I am nothing but the people and culture around me. The work I make serves solely as cultural anthropology. I gather information about the times I’ve lived in, the people I have known and know, the mythologies that permeate my American life, and I capitalize on their nonsensical and ironic nature. Then I contrast them with the deep-seated emotion involved in defining self. And finally, in artist statements I like to write lofty sounding sentences that have little to no actual meaning.