Through my most recent work, I strive to simulate the absurdity of information-saturated contemporary life while exploring such concepts as infinity and the point of singularity; more specifically the daunting nature of infinity in a post-digital age.
My artistic practice is rooted in traditional landscape painting, cartoon inspired illustrative drawing, textured collage and experimental found object sculpture, all of which have informed the aesthetic sensibilities of my divulgence into new media. Working with a dialogue that I construct by selecting moving stickers, sprites and videos from various digital contexts and integrating them with my own paintings and photographs, I create gif-like moving images which I then digitally alter and archive in sets.Transfixed by the idea of being able to collage moving images as a sort of pigment themselves, my final integration of these collected components is to fit as many into one piece as possible. The nightmarish images, densely packed compositions and overall approach to space and time in the paintings of fifteenth century painter Hieronymus Bosch remain my greatest stylistic influence. Alongside 6 or 7 recurring symbols that make up the iconography of my digital work, I am fixated on baroque frames as a motif throughout, both because their historical context plays into the very themes of grotesque excess and the anxieties of late stage capitalism that I seek to subtly evoke, and because they are often the means by which I compartmentalize individual compositions within the context of the whole. Just as every conscious being is confined to their own specific experience and point of perception, these isolated worlds run parallel to one another but remain eternally contained within their own orbit. Furthermore, I utilize transparency and layering in both my paintings and videos as a means of simulating the idea of multiple simultaneous realities. The resulting images often lead way to forms of their own, serving as what I envision to be the shadows of thoughts and objects that exist somewhere in the collective unconscious but have yet to be defined, some perhaps inexpressible in words at all. |