Painting: Fabric Series
I love playing with "pacing" in my work by combining rapid-processes with painfully slow ones. In this series I would start with a photo transfer on delicate upholstered fabric, and then work over the surface with sand, gold leafing, resin, and thread.
Painting: Motor City Series
Born the son of an automobile engineer, I spent most of my youth in industrial cities, surrounded by the abundance of rusting infrastructure and bellowing factories. I started to see a beauty in the chaos, a sublime mix of decay, anthropomorphism, and monumental scale. I often used industrial materials such as tar and grease to add a pungent odor to the imagery.
Painting: Costume Series
I have always been fascinated with the mechanisms of disguise; specifically in regard to hero worship, fanaticism, identity, and sexuality. Formula 1 racing provided an ideal landscape for fantasy, so when I found myself assembling race car driver costumes and paintings, I began to draw comparisons between my subject matter and process - was "The Artist " a costume too?
Performance: "Image"
A 27 minute performance investigating identity, sexuality, hero-worship, and costume. Based on the death of legendary racing driver Aryton Senna, the performance maps the journey of an ordinary person transforming into his hero through disguise and manipulated media. As the protagonist slowly becomes Senna, archival footage displays Senna's last moments in real time.
The push and pull between "Reality" and "Fantasy" eventually cross paths and for a small moment the two narratives become inseparable. This feeling is fleeting and the illusion is shattered as our faux hero exits his car and undresses as the final image of Senna's body being transported away fades into the background.
Performance:
British Soldiers
(Do Not Fuck Up)
Like most shy children I was fascinated with disguise and imitation. My adolescent costumes functioned as camouflage, physically concealing my insecurities with masks, helmets, uniforms, and props. My adult costumes were more pretentious—seeking greater attention and becoming harder to distinguish from reality.
British Soldiers, a 37-minute nationalistic spectacle, weaves the allure of childish pretend with the trappings of deceit. Performed in an old house destined for demolition, the adult actors employed the elements of surprise, fear, shock, and violence to keep the audience distracted from the naive and childish themes being projected.
Centered on the conflicts of 1970’s Northern Ireland, British Soldiers tells a biased story of gallantry, vigilantism, treachery, and bereavement while simultaneously revealing the artifice of the fable. As believability in the illusion is replaced with pity for the artist, the performance resorts to breaching the audience space as a last effort to distract from the truth.
The audience responded differently every night. Some laughed, some cried, some felt used, and others displayed anger. I intentionally left the uncertainty as the one real moment I could not control, what I didn’t prepare for was my own reaction.
