ARTIST STATEMENT

Although I spend a great deal of time and effort on verisimilitude, there’s nothing very remarkable about the images by themselves.  The compositions are formally conventional representations of day-to-day banality.  I use a traditional painterly notation to title my work, still life or landscape, to identify the contextual mode of the painting, and with kitten or with train to identify the presence of a given subject in the painting. 

The catalyst for the conceptual content in my work is the interaction between an image and its title.  Unlike more traditional paintings, I deny the explicit representation of the subject in an image, creating an expectation but denying presence and thus establishing a conflict.  The tension in the pictures is about what you can’t see, at least with your eyes. 

I invite viewers to contemplate the perceived disparity between image and title.  Sometimes this means completing the picture mentally, visualizing the invisible spaces that exist outside the picture plane.  Sometimes this means evaluating one’s own role as a viewer in relation to the context and subject of a given piece.  I chose to make work in which the title acts as more than annotation, but rather as a necessary component which, in conjunction with an image, facilitates the intended dialogue.   

Informal epistemological questions are the impetus for my work.  As consumers of massive quantities of information, we tend to establish many of our actions and beliefs on assumptions, the justification for which is often suspect, whether we realize it or not.  We make better sense of the world and ourselves when we exercise our most critical faculties to sort through conflicting information, what we see on this television screen versus that television screen, what we hear from authority A versus what we hear from authorities B and C.  I selected my working strategies to make viewers more conscious of the reasoning that justifies their basic individual and collective beliefs.