Paintings
The complexities of current socio-political events have inspired me to combine images from disparate sources in order to address the use of violence by humans to solve human conflicts. The paintings are ‘layered’ interpretations of violence and how they occur at micro/macro frictional levels and how events although separated by time and space are subliminally interrelated.
In today’s informational age global occurrences of violence now reach us by a click of a button: creating a network of virtual simulations of fear that are increasingly replacing sensations of calm. I am interested in gathering in visual form the spectacle of information, of knowledge and of subjective combinations.
The paintings also reveal the juxtaposition of humor and tragedy exposing the contradictions of reality. My process involves combining commercial iconography, signage, symbols and text with imagery often associated with violence. Through bi-association of commercial and tragic imagery I expose the simultaneous occurence of sustenance and decadence, and also between life and death. Human and animal body parts are often combined with man-made objects, sometimes morphing into unexpected mutations. Such parallels reveal the interconnectedness between life and the inanimate.
My objective is to draw attention through painting to the visceral relationships between seemingly unrelated objects; to increase the tension between comparative forms; and to blur distinctions between the familiar and the novel.
The paintings are created with mixed media: acrylics, oils, enamels and collage on canvas or on found objects.
