My work imagines an afterlife grounded in the physical, questioning faith-based stories of how we die. It exchanges heaven for a new purchase on one's material body—in narrative paintings, characters both known and anonymous dig themselves out of the ground instead of passing on to a vaporous afterworld.
The narrative, admittedly absurd, is painted with utter sincerity. It becomes earnest in the scrupulous visual description of sites and events. I am interested in the straight-faced delivery of absurd content, specifically as a mode that can challenge the ‘leap of faith’ through a kind of parody. In my recent paintings, passages of densely knit brushstrokes and neurotically detailed information have been grafted from Thomas Cole or Caspar David Friedrich landscapes. The heavy description unravels into patches of washy pours, a transparency that is less about revealing the painting’s stagecraft than affirming my own willingness to be seduced by the medium. Materiality, critical to every dimension of my project, is linked to the idea that meaning is exactly located in the observable. Landscapes, for example, resist the easy digestibility of compressed visual information—approaching the surface of Getting the Most Out of Your Séance, instead of jpeg-like pixelation, one finds an ever-increasing amount of minutiae.
In March of 2007, I became fascinated with Anna Nicole Smith’s death and her secular resurrection in the tabloid media. Painting her afterlife was a way to literalize the media’s model of grief, and led me to the work I make currently. The three-dimensional pieces of Anna Nicole are both earnest effigies and dime-store parodies; they suggest the possibility of rascally sanctity while enacting remembrance through a decadent, manual activity.
Personal, religious, and pop cultural systems continuously mount defenses against the material reality of death-- a denial which is, on some level, necessary. In my work, I look for a mode that permits both an admission of my own complicity and a stubborn criticality toward this denial.