My work is about the regulation of the self in a historical moment of excess. Shifts in culture have taken us further than ever towards a place of doing the work of our own self-diagnosis and self-medication, with an ever-larger menu of options. The individual engages in daily acts of self-dosage, not merely with actual pharmaceuticals but with information, pop culture, and food, for example. Via many possible mechanisms, such as a trauma or an imbalance in one's brain chemistry, individuals and communities can slip into extreme positions, oscillating between points of overindulgence and abstention, consumption and production, and madness and tranquility.
My work is informed by this conceptual framework, as well as more expressive, subjective neuroses, such as short attention span, mania, general anxiety, and dysmorphia, that can be both individualized characteristics and contemporary trends. My practice ultimately depends upon understanding the human body as a filter which takes in, processes, absorbs, and excretes certain bits of experience, information, and chemicals, a kind of overlaying of biology and culture into one physical spot. The human body, in its efforts to self-regulate these experiences and chemicals, can thus exist in moments of great beauty and transcendence or abject self-destruction and failure, sometimes simultaneously.
I work in a variety of media, including sculpture, video, painting, installation, and drawing. Many pieces are simultaneously seductive and repulsive, sensual and conceptual, representational and abstract, humorous and pathetic, figurative and cellular, and operating on the micro and macro levels. Rather than pushing on the hyperbolic poles of these oppositions, the works tend to exist in a state of controlled tension, a quivering middle point of anxiety that could slip in either direction at any time. My anthropological background produces impulses of research, collection, and analysis that then mutates into very different forms, ranging from assemblages of found objects to purely abstract forms. While individual pieces contain their own importance, meaning is multiplied, complicated, and sometimes inverted in the installation of the works, when very different kinds of work (a series of altered magazine pages and an abstract metal sculpture, for instance) are juxtaposed.
Some recent sculptural series, such as Revolvers and Brains, use assemblage to unite disparate found objects and abstract forms with the chemical fluidity of paint and resin. Revolvers uses the traditional sculptural tool of the sculptor's "wheel" as a base, and then builds up a combination of found objects, resin pours, and spray paint to produce eerie works that are doubly suggestive of bodily fragments and accumulations of cultural detritus. Paint, resin, or actual pharmaceuticals serve as a chemical stand-in for the molecular interactions our bodies engage with on a daily basis. I also work with metal and wood to create more abstract works, which toe the line of obvious historical referent and uncanny yet contemporary object. The Zombies series mixes a minimalist form with an expressionistic surface to create a series of melancholic objects which shift between traumatized figures to flattened fluid surfaces as one moves around the sculpture.
In my video pieces and installations I move between performative actions, appropriated commercial footage, and essayistic narrative. Works are typically very long or very short, and I use time and the limits of the moving image to push on impulses of boredom and action, narrative and abstraction, and meaning and pointlessness. In the recent project La Mer d'artista, alone in my studio, I record a multi-hour process of destroying a wine barrel, while simultaneously engaging in obsessive hygienic acts, self-medication, and expressionistic painting gestures. This "performance" is edited down into a 30 minute mixture of chromatically abstract sequences and hyperbolic, repetitive narratives set to symphonic music (Claude Debussy's La Mer). I use effects such as chroma keying, dissolves, cuts, and opacity levels to collapse space and bring in appropriated footage of the "outside" world, such as television advertisements, amateur video footage, or even my own footage from previous works, to create a sense of psychological and chemical space on the screen, combined with the physical, bodily space of my performance. The sources of influence shift abruptly from Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa to Piero Manzoni's conceptual works to swine flu paranoia to amateur Youtube videos.
In the Self-Portraits series I take found advertisements featuring people from magazines and paint the face out of the figure in the ad. These ephemeral vehicles of capital are often beautiful and disturbing, and the act of painting over the face and the head (and by default, the brain) is a mark that claims the image as "mine." The goal is a specifically generous and futile exercise to claim every advertised image in the world as part of my very self, by inserting myself, through the gesture of making an abstract mark and a literal "de-facing", (or a "re-facing" using abstraction) into the image. The series is endless, infinite, limited only by time and the number I can and choose to produce. The futility of such a process nods to Douglas Huebler's goal to photographically document ''the existence of everyone alive'' and Allan McCollum's "The Shapes Project," while also referencing genetic banks and biotech companies that are attempting to collect the DNA of every living human.
The Contamination and Anatomical Fragments series of paintings tend to suggest figurative structures (faces, bodies, limbs), even as they also evoke cells, molecules, and biomorphic shapes. They function on a macro and micro level simultaneously, tug at contradictory impulses of diagnosing abstraction on the one hand, and literal representation on the other, as if a readable body scan. They use alternating and overlapping aesthetic systems and reference points (sprays, drips, grids, color palettes) to further complicate this reading. Paint is treated as a chemical element, and applied in a manner suggestive of dosage. Conceptual and formalist painting tropes are engaged and discarded as elements of chance, accident, and intuition enter and exit the works, complicating their read. The aura of flat digitally created imagery, be it a magazine advertisement, a computer screen, or a MRI printout, is reduced into a completely abstracted format, in which I treat paint as a sculptural element, using thin layers of spray paint to create works that echo both the digital and the analog. The works thus appear abstract but are layered with meaning, and are in theory simultaneously as readable and as nonsensical as an MRI scan or genetic code mapping.
My work ultimately explores how cultural systems, such as medicine, advertising, and aesthetics shift over time, and the way in which they are intimately tied in with how we understand our bodies, the spaces our bodies are in, and the spaces that are in our bodies. The body as a site of knowledge and a recording device for our chemical and cultural histories is the space of my exploration, from the micro to macro level. How we regulate and dose our selves in the midst of a contradictory cultural prescription for moderation and a proliferation of overindulgence becomes both the theoretical framework and the method of production in my work.