My newest works are concerned with layering. At the outset this idea is presented through collage elements beneath the surface of the paint, as well as with the primary image of the reflections of the female form in mirrors.
The collage elements beneath the surface of the paint contain everything from scratch tickets to receipts; comic books pictures to design-build drawings of fighter jets; coloring book images to clippings from the National Enquirer. This creates a very literal and physical sense of layering that lends itself to ideas of intellectual layering, metaphorical layering, and the overall layered meaning of the pieces themselves. Viewers are continually invited to look past what they are seeing to the next thing and their next set of responses.
These works use high-contrast acrylic paints with intense colors and various levels of opacity to create striking images with their collage elements showing through. Generally these collage elements are found objects that I enlarge or reduce in size and as a photocopy onto cardstock paper and then adhere to the surface of the canvas. This often creates a rippling effect of the paper that indicates a greater literal depth to the surface than a flattened approach might bring.
What are you looking at? is the overriding question these works seek to present. There are so many layers of meaning and influence in the everyday images we are bombarded with— and too often take for granted— that presenting them in different ways may inspire some new consideration of what we are all actually looking at. And maybe even, what the impact of this relationship is to our images of self and society.
Present is an inference that these images taken from education, marketing, consumerism, the mass media, etc. truly do make us who we are to some extent. Thus, the women in these mirrored scenes are presented in a moment of contemplation about who and what they see. What are you looking at? is their question, personally— as well as in direct relation to what they see in their everyday lives.
It is ours as well, as we catch them here in an intimate moment of recasting and reconsidering themselves.
The collage elements beneath the surface of the paint contain everything from scratch tickets to receipts; comic books pictures to design-build drawings of fighter jets; coloring book images to clippings from the National Enquirer. This creates a very literal and physical sense of layering that lends itself to ideas of intellectual layering, metaphorical layering, and the overall layered meaning of the pieces themselves. Viewers are continually invited to look past what they are seeing to the next thing and their next set of responses.
These works use high-contrast acrylic paints with intense colors and various levels of opacity to create striking images with their collage elements showing through. Generally these collage elements are found objects that I enlarge or reduce in size and as a photocopy onto cardstock paper and then adhere to the surface of the canvas. This often creates a rippling effect of the paper that indicates a greater literal depth to the surface than a flattened approach might bring.
What are you looking at? is the overriding question these works seek to present. There are so many layers of meaning and influence in the everyday images we are bombarded with— and too often take for granted— that presenting them in different ways may inspire some new consideration of what we are all actually looking at. And maybe even, what the impact of this relationship is to our images of self and society.
Present is an inference that these images taken from education, marketing, consumerism, the mass media, etc. truly do make us who we are to some extent. Thus, the women in these mirrored scenes are presented in a moment of contemplation about who and what they see. What are you looking at? is their question, personally— as well as in direct relation to what they see in their everyday lives.
It is ours as well, as we catch them here in an intimate moment of recasting and reconsidering themselves.
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