“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men
will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of
everyone.”
— John Maynard Keynes [1]
My work explores the domesticated human animal negotiating the compromises and conflicts of its social contract. As borders between cultures become less defined, the limitations of human self-interest become more apparent.
The figures in my paintings and animations exist in uneven relationships with their environments. A stately wallpaper pattern defines the guest room where a corpse is disposed. A family’s fractured relationship is echoed in the repeated and divided depiction of domesticity. A matriarch refuses her servants in the gardens of a well-manicured estate. A seducer slips from the balcony of his would-be lover with a breath and a push. An heiress in a fur coat consumes an exotic feast in a steamy bath.
As a painter, I combine Western aesthetics of perspective, portraiture, and narrative into formal and conceptual explorations of contemporary forms of representation (photography, digital imaging, colored fills). As an animator, I combine these visual interests with the manipulation of scale and timing. Time moves irregularly and artificially, bound by physical or musical rhythm. An object’s scale and value shift over time, undulating with each transformation. Narrative is reduced to its most primitive state as the representation of an event is obscured by sentiment.
The savage etiquette of domestic space finds influence in early Modernist primitivism’s rejection of monoculture, the culture vultures of Brazil’s Anthropophagia movement, and a surrealist tendency towards the actual function of thought. Boundaries are drawn when Hobbes’ savage man cedes natural rights to escape a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” life or Rousseau’s civilized man trades rational self-preservation for relative self-worth. Similar parallels are seen in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” promoting better living through self-interest and Marx’s rejection of the division of labor as a brutal definition of classes.
Recent experiments contrasting physical scale with economic value and the impulse of instinctual narrative have opened new areas of exploration.
[1] Globalization and Poverty, by Ann E. Harrison, University of
Chicago Press, 2007, ISBN 0226317943, pg 61