“Man of the House” Artist Statement
I started this series of paintings in the summer of 2020. This was a time of change and transition for most of us. For me, this included a major relocation to the Midwest. As many of us found ourselves at home more than ever, I was surrounded by new walls and not much knowledge of what lay beyond. Many of these paintings were started from studio spaces inside my home, sometimes just a corner of the living room. They reflect the intense interiority, both figurative and literal, of the past two years. Much of my past work has explored gender and gender roles. In this series, those questions became more self-reflective as I considered my own gender, my relationship to masculinity, my queerness, my role as a husband and soon-to-be father, and my place in domestic and family life.
“Older Sister” Artist Statement
My painting process centers on building layers, working with oil to add, subtract and blur. In this process, I have a relationship with both the source images and the paint itself. My work has involved found photos since 2005 when I was an art student and stumbled upon a box of abandoned family photos next to a dumpster in a Philadelphia alley. I'm drawn to the painterly quality of colors created by old film cameras and amateur lighting, as well as the informal postures of the figures and the scuffs and smudges that occur over time to their surfaces. By recreating and reinterpreting these snapshots in the traditional medium of oil paint, I work to expose the beauty of these discarded artifacts. In the process I bring abandoned memories back to life.
Often I work from sets of photos shot at the same event, on the same roll of film, so that the images together create a cast of characters and a narrative to draw from. They depict family events, birthdays and vacations, as easy to relate to as they are strange and unknowable. In particular I'm interested in the ways people pose themselves for memories and the tension between what a person might have been trying to convey then and what is conveyed now, by what can be captured in a photograph and what the photograph shows is not there. In my painting, I use paint to express that tension more clearly, erasing or adding from other photos or my own invention. As I slowly build and excavate layers of paint, my relationship with the world of the photo deepens. Presenting the paintings in turn asks the viewer to bring themselves into a relationship with the images. These connections made mean everything to me.