Onlookers (2021-2023)

The Onlookers series employs portraiture to interrogate anxieties, hopes, and uncertainties around the acceleration of technological progress and its future implications. These works were initiated by creating a dataset of hundreds of images of my entire body of work as an artist, as well as examples of influences and ephemera surrounding my creative practice. This dataset was then fed into a machine learning program designed to generate new images consistent with those provided. When used with a massive set of similar source images, such programs can produce convincing artificial images of subjects such as cats or sneakers. However, my unorthodox approach of providing a smaller scale dataset of personally linked but inconsistent sources, meant to illustrate the arc of an ongoing creative practice, produced highly unusual and irregular interpretations of my work that were at once confounding and strangely familiar. I then took these murky, low-resolution images as a starting point and reimagined them as portrait paintings. The re-introduction of human touch, scrutiny, and materiality have led to a body of paintings that I regard as both a form of uncanny self-portraiture as well as a collaboration (albeit one with a non-human entity). For me, these portraits often read as figures in the distance; presences obscured by layers of misunderstanding but seeking a human connection that remains beyond grasp. Are they entirely new digital life forms? Future human avatars whose bodies have been left behind? Apparitions warning of a dehumanized future? Or are they simply the confused remnants of an intentional misuse of an emerging technology? These and other questions continue to accumulate as each new portrait takes shape.

Interpolators (2018-2020)

The Interpolators series focuses on the process of constructing public persona at a time in which our likenesses have become increasingly malleable, fraught, and self-searching. In these works, signifying objects collide and disperse to build portrait subjects which appear hyper-performative yet exist in a constant state of flux. These objects, symbols, and patterns both attach and remove themselves from the human form at such a dizzying pace that they often seem to evoke unpredictable weather patterns to which the subjects must adapt. This interaction seeks to investigate the inherent contradiction between the increasing pressure for self-branding and presentation with the fluid and ever-changing experience of being a person. Ultimately, I view these works as a depiction of a moment in which the construction of public persona, once a rare and curious phenomenon, is now as ubiquitous, relentless, and mercurial as the weather itself.

Disintegrants (2016-2018)

During a time in which we are increasingly inundated with mediated images, digital representations and virtual relationships, a sense of disembodiment can emerge. Our physical forms, once the primary source from which our individual identities arose, have begun to feel tangential. We can now construct ourselves in realms that seem no longer determined by our physicality, and in some senses we can transcend our natural abilities and characteristics.  This new notion of self-determination can feel at once exhilarating and unnerving.

The works comprising this series seek a form of portraiture that describes the departure of its subjects from their physical entities. Rather than focusing on traditional portrait elements of likeness, anatomy and contextual surroundings, these portraits are concerned with more abstract characteristics such as cognition, motivation and transition. The predominant forms in these works are sourced from abandoned painting stretchers, suggesting an armature that can be both deconstructed and liberated from its previous incarnation. These brightly colored and patterned elements collide and break apart to suggest subjects that correspond to a physical body but are not bound by its limitations. While there is a celebratory component to these forms, their fractured and precarious nature also suggests what self-psychologist Heinz Kohut called “disintegration anxiety,” describing the fear of a cohesive self breaking apart irreversibly. Ultimately, I see these works as neither portraits of our physical forms nor the illusory selves we construct, but rather of the mercurial bodies that exist in between.

Occupants (2012-2015)

We all experience moments in which the roles we play in our daily lives come to define us in powerful ways. In the pursuit of survival, prosperity, leisure, social status, and personal meaning, we often assume identities that both define and fail to define us. My current body of work explores the possibilities and limitations of our daily occupations at a time in which we frequently change jobs, balance multiple roles, and cannot easily delineate between private and public life.

Traditionally, the portrait has sought to convey both the individual characteristics of the sitter and tell us something about their role in society. In particular, the genre of occupational portraiture has described its subjects through the lens of their daily working lives. The portraits in this body of work seek to reinterpret this genre by deemphasizing the sitters’ individual characteristics in order to create images of figures entirely consumed by their given occupations. These works concentrate on tools, uniforms, ephemera, and other signifiers that both define the sitters’ roles and obscure their identifying qualities. Inevitably, despite the attempt to faithfully translate each subject’s position, this unwieldy process of piling on and covering up results in a certain degree of incongruity, perhaps offering a reflection of the rapidly changing nature of our daily roles and practices. I view this body of work as a kind of group portrait; one that is both intensely descriptive and curiously elusive.