Artist Statement
As a Zillennial, digital native and paint enjoyer, I’m driven to create artwork that explores the unique tensions characterizing visual culture today. My approach emphasizes painting’s illusionary qualities through a focus on the interplay of surface, texture, and layering processes. The surfaces of my paintings playfully shift between the hand-painted, mechanical interventions and diffusion-generated imagery, blurring distinctions between each element. My recent work features two distinct approaches to painting that often intersect and influence each other, leading me to create separate series titled: "Figurative Fragments" and "Looking Glass".
Figurative Fragments Series
I have an interest in painting’s cultural history, as it once offered a portal into grand narratives, using illusion in a way that prefigured Photoshop to reflect the era's desires. In this series, I source historical paintings from the web and digitally manipulate via blurring, smudging, and erasing to distance them from their original context, shifting focus to the canvas's surface texture. I employ a digital-style layering method by stacking films of paint before cutting out digital-eraser shapes to reveal paint stratum beneath. The contrast of blurred imagery melding into the crisp digital contours of a multi-layered collage evokes stained glass or shattered screens. This method emulates digital photoshop processes, showcasing an innovative use of common painting conventions to highlight the medium's distinct characteristics.
Looking Glass Series
In this series, I fuse uncommon arrangements of mediums and materials to form what I call an "impossible painting". Inspired by the textured prints sold in stores like HomeSense, I began experimenting by layering digital imagery over hand-painted textures to give physical form to images typically only possible via digital effects. For instance, I initially printed CGI light simulations from Blender directly onto hand-painted brushstrokes that trace the image’s contours but I've since expanded this technique. The process offers a moment of tactile engagement and deliberate pause, while simultaneously reflecting on the unbound, ephemeral flow of digital space. As a result, the work oscillates between various forms of visual production to absorb the disorienting impact of endless image streams in the current age.