ARTIST STATEMENTS

PORTRAITS

This body of work explores the vocabulary of the human figure.  I am very inspired by the art of the Italian Baroque, in which the tiniest  variations in the curve of the neck or angle of the shoulders can communicate completely different emotions.  The language of the human body is one of the most basic and universally understood, making it an ideal means of communication. My portraits also often reflect the influence of Cindy Sherman and allegorical portraits of the Renaissance and Baroque in the way that they explore alternate identities. 

The single figure in the picture plane creates a pared-down and intimate experience between the figure and the viewer. I want the viewer to feel as though they are witnessing the subject in a pure and vulnerable moment. However, I don’t intend this vulnerability of the subject to appear as a weakness, but rather as powerful and almost confrontational in its honesty. In my work, I want empty space to have a weight and dynamic equal to the figure. By deliberately creating an unbalanced composition, I hope to generate a tension between the subject and the space they inhabit and to imply an imminent action or connection. In this particular aspect of my work, I am greatly inspired by Caravaggio who, unlike other Baroque artists, often portrayed not the moment of highest action but the instant just before or after that moment. 

Most of these portraits are large-scale works on paper using fairly simple materials: pencil, acrylic paint, watercolor pencil, masking tape and paper collage.  Often, in works on paper, the subject of the work is built up through the use of a drawing or painting medium and the surface of the paper itself, when it is visible at all,  is only visible in the background. In my work, the opposite is true. I specifically choose to work on rosin paper because of its beautiful reddish-brown color and its irregular and mottled surface, which reminds me of skin. So, instead of allowing only fleeting glimpses of the paper’s surface in the background, I actually compose the figure itself using the bare surface of the paper. I feel this, along with my use of “humble” materials lends the work a minimalist aesthetic consistent with its stark composition and contributing to the intimate and unobstructed connection between viewer and subject. 

RATS

 This body of work explores themes of compassion, sacrifice, empathy and knowledge, humans’ relationship with animals (particularly animals used in scientific experiments), romanticized concepts of nature versus the merciless reality of survival in the animal kingdom, as well as connectedness and the idea of cause and effect. This series is based on the poem “The Roving Rats” by Heinrich Heine and inspired by other written sources such as Robert C. O’Brien’s novel, The Rats of NIMH and articles from scientific journals and textbooks.

 At the core of this body of work is the dichotomy, both personal and cultural, between the anthropomorphized idea of animals as noble and innocent and the reality of nature as merciless and indifferently violent. For me, this dichotomy becomes especially poignant within the context of using animals, particularly rats, as subjects for scientific experiments. It should be said, however, that I am not interested in creating gory and didactic propaganda for animal rights activists. As a lover of both animals and science, I am more interested in plumbing the complex depths of both ways of relating to these animals. One way in which I try to express this dichotomy visually in my work is through the juxtaposition of sentimental hand-drawn portraits of rats with more removed (although still beautiful) images of diagrams and anatomical illustrations from textbooks and scientific journals.

Another pervasive theme in this series is the idea of new connections and causal relationships within experience and information. This concept manifests visually in the recurring motif of flow charts, circuits, neurons and synapses. An infinite number of disparate bits of information exist in the world.  From writing (both fact and fiction), to pictures, to spoken word, to memory, these bits of information take many different forms.  There also exists an infinite number of beautiful and often poignant connections between these bits of information. Once I start looking for these connections, I find that more and more begin to present themselves until they create a giant mysterious and elegant web of deeper meaning through association. So, while this series of artworks began as a response to Heine’s poem, it has expanded to include many other related themes.