VISUAL ART
Assorted works
My work so often employs a connection to art history as a way to ask how we relatte to our personal histories and our cultural ones. In those relationships who holds power and who holds truth?
Of Exceptions
This project takes Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling painting and its associated history as its basis. Like most of the work I do, I utilize this foundation as a place to have conversations about the real histories of our culture which have not had painted ceilings. These histories, when ignored, have excluded so many from having cultural input. OF EXCEPTIONS offers a new way to see what we assume holds power and authority over culture.
These are select studies of the Sistinee Chapel ceiling and provide some idea of the versions the final project will employ.
Blue Boys
Taking the image of Blue Boy as inspiration this series explores what happens when we confront our childhood and the range of traumas that may be related to it.
Baroke
This selection of artworks takes baroque paintings, the ideas of excess, and applies them to a question of spontineity and scribbled crayon markings.
It was important for this series that the drawings were done only with supplies that would be avialable to me on a psych ward. Pencils and crayons. When we had to do our group time it was seldom seen as anythign other than a necessary part of keeping us happy at some minor level. I wanted to challenege the complicit nature of "non-professional" art making tools in the way we see maad folx as "not professional" enough to even comprhenc their own experiences.
Marengo
This mono-print series uses the image of Napoleon to explore the complexity of identity and how a singular version of ourselves can often be visited in multiplicity, and how that vastness can be unique and beautiful in its own ways.
Poor Traits
Many see madness as a poor trait to be eliminated from our humanity. Psychopharmaceuticals are often employed to this end. However, we hide the ways in which the powerful are also affected by madness, assuming it is only a trait of the weak. How do we change this discourse and reimagine a humanity which embodies its own diversity of experiences.
Introductory Analysis of a Still LIfe
Using diagrams of the compositions of Cezanne this works attempts to see how far analysis can be taken before it breaks down and exposes its own fallibility.
Landscapes
How we label things tells us a lot about how we are held down by their definitions. These landscapes ask us to look inward at how we experience a definition in relation to the work in front of us. Why is it we are willing to make allowances when something appears abstract, but we do not allow mad folx to experience the world beyond a normative definition that we are unable to fully define ourselves?
apoem
Challenging our use of peotic understanding and language is central to understanding the complexity of madness.
