Artist Statement, Long

There's something reassuring about a story. A story is structured; a story is built out of a formula. You think you know what will happen, and then you come to find out that you're right. A story can exist as an intentionally constructed piece of fiction, as in a novel, a film, a lengthy joke, an elaborate lie... but also as all sorts of other things, which we don't tend to regard as being fictitious or being constructed. If an occurrence - an historical event, a personal experience - follows a plot, then it's understandable; it “makes sense.” Cause and effect, conflict and resolution, “the moral of this story,” a bit of comic relief, all the little details serving to support “the point” of the story: these are the tools with which we build our view of the world and everything in it. If things seem rational, explainable, or systematic, it's because we “edit” them that way; if things provoke frustration, it's because they are in actuality not that way.

To say that this system of fictionalizing is wrong or bad would certainly be a mistake though (the complaint that this makes no sense makes use of the very logic which is under scrutiny here). Some sort of framework serves to streamline our thinking and communicating, no doubt. There is, however, no harm in making fun of it a little bit.

The body of work you see here is story-making, fictionalizing, and fakeness in action. The imagery and the basic plots are in many ways cliché; these faces, settings, and situations are all strangely familiar, from some place and time we all know well, but which never existed. And this work mimics the layered structure inherent to the phenomenon of fiction in context: a thing is false only if some other thing is true. In reading these paintings, one comes to realize that there are (at least) two distinct layers. The initial interpretation is that these are convincing illusionistic scenes, illustrating some humorously absurd story, and the initial reaction, generally, is laughter. Many viewers also find themselves trying to “figure out” the story. This superficial, fictitious layer does start to fall apart after a little while. The first notion to collapse is that this is realist painting: not one bit of any of these is painted from real life. The style is actually meticulously amateuristic, and all the people resemble mid 20th century advertising models.

Perhaps next would be the humor deflating; the thinly veiled themes here include senseless violence, failed attempts at connection with others, lewdness, misogyny, guilt, shame, paranoia, and perhaps insanity. What was stupidly blatant and funny becomes mysterious, complex, and sad. This is just close enough to reality to have a hazy, haunting relevance, but just far enough away to allow us to point at it and laugh. As for the cohesive narrative we try to grasp for, there is absolutely nothing more to be found here than empty clues and hints; these suggest stories, but don't follow through. This isn't so much “anti-narrative” as it is “stupid narrative,” for the viewer and for the characters. In many of these scenes, there is a piece of true randomness, a phenomenon which is positively unexplainable, and these characters either can't see it, or perhaps they believe it's normal, or perhaps anything: there is a complete lack of “useful” information. So, for the viewer, this is quite the opposite of reassuring.

This does of course beg the question, “what sorts of absurd or horrible things do people just not notice in real, actual, contemporary life?” Probably all sorts. Today's fakeness is very powerful, and there's lots of source material all over the place. For this text to attempt an answer to that question would bring it as far out on a limb of fictitiousness and fabrication as... well, at least as far as the average person walking down the street... And this body of work is not at all concerned with actual, contemporary life; if it was, it would be too serious, too meaningful, too important, and not at all effective. In the end, a silly joke is all this work definitely is. Some sort of trashy entertainment. For some reason, despite all the disturbing implications and such, one can always return to theses images later, and find him or her self laughing at them again. You can't argue with a good joke.