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Excerpt From “I Was Raised In A Theme Park”
Doors and portals, fetish objects and shrines, representations of water and electricity are the primary subjects of my props and play pieces. Contemporary escapist media, like sci-fi movies, comic books, and fantasy novels, use these objects to depict power and the human involvement in the supernatural. I am slowly building a taxonomy of modern depictions of spirituality and magic to create a visual language to describe my perfect place of escape, release, and meditation.
What is more important to me than creating a perfect illusionistic space is forming a fictitious space that quickly shifts between illusory and concretely material. I think of these spaces as sets or “play” pieces that forcibly exercise the viewer’s ability to make that perceptual shift. A suspension of disbelief is necessary to enter into the four-dimensional world my two-dimensional works imply.
The paintings showcase the physical and visual interaction of recognizable objects and purely abstract mark. These interactions oscillate between awkward and transcendent, often deconstructing mid-action to highlight the component structure of the mark. I want to fragment the viewer’s interface, even the point-of-entry, into the narrative of each piece. Marks become particulate, mimicking the piecemeal structure of language. As letters make up words and words sentences, so marks accumulate to make figures. My current inspiration for my visual lexicon comes from Indian sign-wallahs and Chinese calligraphy.