Statement for current show at R Street Gallery:

My current body of work focuses on collaboration, cross-disciplinary thinking, and institutional critique—in the form of monkeying around with hierarchies and art historical sacred cows.

In my last two projects—Ian and Jan: The Washington Body School with Meg Mitchell at DCAC in 2007, and ASSIMILATION/DISSOLUTION with Jefferson Pinder and Christopher Hoeting at Flashpoint in 2006—I used video, photography and drawing as interchangeable tools in the service of philosophical inquiry—or elaborate parody.

I was trained as a painter. I do continue to paint, and have been wrestling with the question of reintegrating painting with the other elements of my practice. The two paintings on view here, Une Balle Au Coeur I & II (2008), are the first stirrings of that reintegration, and an attempt to cheekily embody the paradox at the heart of avante garde gallery culture. 

Contemporary art is created with the implicit belief that the artworld continues to operate with some sort of forward trajectory. Though references may be made in contemporary/postmodern works to past movements, images, or historical moments, contemporary artists still believe that transgression and change are possible.

Yet the arena in which nearly all artists work relies on commodification, consumption, and agreed-upon standards of presentation and propriety. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it does create a strange sort of disconnect: Ideas about the radical transformation of daily life through visual culture are necessarily dependent upon money, academies, and institutions.

Une Balle Au Coeur is a reference to the French author and leader of the Situationist International group, Guy Debord. In 1967, Debord wrote Society of the Spectacle, a tremendously influential book that in large measure helped foment the Paris uprising of May 1968.

Though the events of 1968 had a tremendous impact on continental philosophy, universities, and the arts, they arguably had negligible effects on the political sphere. 

In 1994, mostly due to his deteriorating health and rampant alcoholism, Debord committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart.

The images in these paintings are drawn from Situationist posters from 1968—clean-edged, colorful, and cartoonish, these raised fists, herded sheep, and shadowy policemen are graphically irresistible. My paintings have increasingly become about simpler, hard-edged shapes interacting and overlapping, so these images make an obvious formal choice as fodder. 

Unlike my last group of abstractions—which were mostly about the sumptuousness of oil, spread in countless glazes to reflect my digitally transformed photographic images—the paintings in this new series were done on raw, unprimed canvas, using mostly acrylic paint, albeit with some accents in oil. The raw canvas soaks up the pigment and tends to enforce a sort of chalky, unifying flatness—appropriate for posters and broadsides, I think.

Making colorful, decorative paintings out of revolutionary propaganda is admittedly a slightly silly, overstated gesture. But it is also an honest and appropriate reflection of the business of art—dependant on revolutionary ideas and moneyed interests in equal measure.

All good art is on some level about failure, about intangible things or things not actually present, and the fantasy of pure autonomy. To know this and to continue to make art anyway—believing in its power as an agent for real transformation despite all evidence to the contrary—is the continuing challenge.