The artists who have had the greatest impact on me have been Gregory Crewdson, David Lynch, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Kienholz, William Eggleston, and Edward Hopper.
This work is about the exploration of the uncanny in American suburbia. I want to create a world, or slivers of a world, that are interconnected by aesthetic and mood. I want the feeling of a narrative without actually ever explaining one. I don’t want to tell the whole story, just fragments. You can dream the rest. There are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery, and a mystery means there’s a puzzle to be solved. Rather than helping solve this riddle, I am more interested in preserving the secret than making it generally comprehensible. I lay the clues or the mood, and the viewers can input their own fears, neuroses, and anxieties into them. In search of a key, the audience ultimately will encounter only themselves.
These paintings also illustrate my constant search for perfection. I’ve always had some irrational need to create a perfect image. I strive to create that perfection through detailing, through a weird kind of realist vision. When the mystery in the painting emerges, my irrational need to create a perfect world meets up with some kind of failure to do so. The collision between failure and compulsion to make something perfect creates an anxiety that interests me. The paintings are doomed, in that my compulsion to make a perfect world looms against the impossibility of doing so. No matter what, you cannot achieve the perfect representation.
This hopeless search for perfection is also why I’m so interested in mid-Twentieth Century American life, and why I chose that for my backdrop. At that time everything was shiny and hopeful, and it laid the grounds for what was to become the American Dream, the perfect life. I’ve used the domestic context as a place of structural loneliness. There was something in the air during that time period that is not there anymore. It was a really hopeful time, and you got the feeling you could do anything. Little did we know, we were laying the groundwork for a disastrous future. All the problems were there, but it was somehow glossed over. Then the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out.
This series exposes the idyllic world of rural, small town America as a cinematographic dream, filled with darkness and mystery. It’s the hour where the shadows lengthen and the artificial light of the street lamps replaces natural light. It is when the power of reason wanes and fantasy weaves its own stories. We Americans are permanently fallen creatures, who possess no memory of paradise, only a fantasy of it.
The work is a series of paintings, twenty-eight inches by forty inches, acrylic on wood. Using film stills as my source material, I change light sources, objects, compositions, etc. in order to create my desired mood of unsettlement and the uncanny. I am interested in making the familiar unfamiliar, which creates disturbing anxiety and tension. The key is finding that collision between the familiar and the strange moments that don’t exist, moments in between moments. These paintings exist in time, but the beginning, middle, and end lie elsewhere, outside the frame.
