A flock of birds, a herd of cattle, a murder of crows, a “Treachery Of Images”. A tongue in cheek revamp of “This is not a pipe”, the birthing grounds for postmodern lingual trickery. Art cannot be trusted. Images are illusions, masquerading as objects of truth. Magritte understood seeing the world through the side eye, being suspicious of descriptors. The map is not the destination. The hand points to the stars and we look at the hand. Paint is deception incarnate, always fronting, portraying what it is not. Pigment on a hogs hair bristle dressed up as dumpster fire, a saint being flayed alive, a reconstituted history book of epic landscapes, a documentation of headline sorrows.
The picket sign is everything a flag is not. The flag is national, a picket sign is personal. It is the last resort of the voiceless. The picket sign is a formal redress, a symptom of powerlessness, of not being heard, not being listened to. It is also a foretelling, a foreboding. It says, you are also part of this. And you are next.
In this particular body of work I continue analyzing divisions between modern and historical artifacts. In this vein of intervention, I have sliced up art history and photos pulled from Reuters news, shuffled them and recombined them into compositions that I then used to paint from. By reproducing 19th century landscape paintings, stormy ships at sea, Dutch flowers and fruit, juxtaposed with snapshots pulled from todays headlines: droughts, the forest fires, the missiles launching skyward I am attempting to recontextualize our current moment, providing distance and a perspective into how the impulses of one age dissolve into the next. To paint the images is to reunite them with their art historical background, an archeological strata, a fossil record of human activity, or maybe a kind of museum doomscroll into the future.
