Artist Statement

For over twenty years, image-making for me has been a passion and avenue for exploring experiences, dreams and preoccupations, including issues of our dependence on technology, consumer culture, relationships, spirituality, politics, and the human "theatre".

In my current paintings, I am inspired by the internet platform as a way of investigating current events as well as the human drama as it relates to and is tightly interwoven with our inner, cyber, natural and urban landscapes. My paintings are a critique of as well as a sort of satirical assimilation and celebration of the multiplicity and disparate abundance of visual information often intended to inform, influence, brainwash, side-track, seduce and/or sell something to its audience. My work is based on the visual realm of popular and often infamous imagery and ideas that permeate our social consciousness through the web, especially social networking sites, youtube, and the ubiquitous world of apps and selfies.

I frequently simulate the internet environment through the depiction and layering of unrelated visual units, browser "windows" for dialogue, for information, designs and, of course, spam. I do realize that these "windows", when viewed simultaneously on the computer screen, become unified and challenge the viewer to filter, reject, respond to, or embrace the information. Furthermore, I parody the youtube and app environment where one may imagine a "still" of a streaming video featuring one of my many themes, including makeovers gone wrong, mental "hoarding", experiencing another divine image, texting while driving (and while doing just about anything else), discovering (or re-discovering) one's other selves, and a number of many other irrational scenes within the human "dance of the absurd". The dynamics and urgency of the (post-)informational age we live in fuel and stimulate my work.

Video: Featuring Colorful Paintings from 2011

Below is a very short video - just for fun - featuring a few recent paintings from 2011. Imagery includes colorful images of woman carrying a tomato plant, person hitting an earth "piñata", embryonic sacs carried by birds in a radioactive hail storm, and a decapitated woman on a laptop loses her head and mind as it drifts away pulled by balloons. These paintings feature "dark-humor" surrealist imagery commenting on miraculous apparitions, nature "gone wrong", the atrocities against our environments, and the realities of distractions and "drifting" away in the digital age.