So Small, So Sweet, So Soon
Through a visual language that combines kitsch sensibility, Eurocentric opulence, Victorian taxidermy and fairground art, melodrama and decay take center stage as metaphors for a nebulous American mourning. Rendered in plywood, sorrow percolates from various corners of the American psyche-- or Twittersphere. Animals become pietàs or ornaments or petrified dumbwaiters. Wigs turn into altars, follies or monuments to that which has passed on. The apocalyptic divine sends a flood that will collapse empire. As a coping mechanism, the gargantuan toy theatre serves as an stunted articulation of the chaotically incomprehensible, asking how to best cope with a threatening world.
My work is a type of three dimensional collage, whose unfixed parts allow for continuous recombination and remixing in the process. The pieces assemble as a collection on the wall and slowly fraternize with each other, leaving space for splicing and recontextualization. Fixing paper to wood forces the drawings into space, creating a scene large enough to envelop the viewer; a space in which the fantasy and spectacle of the imagined narrative become quasi-real while wholly unreal-- like they did as a kid at the fair. Flattening space and compressing chaos into a three-dimensional form allows me to create metaphors of confusion and emptiness that coexist both within myself and in our culture; representational drawing aids in narrative invention and the creation of space that is set apart from the habitual world.
Historical references abound, providing an anachronistic mashup of characters, events, places and periods. The import of their inclusion is to mirror America’s own understanding of its history, facts, mythology and identity, as people who come from a long national tradition of wishful dreaming, magical thinking and true believing, by huckstering all potential realities into an impossible coexistence.
The expression of grief and anxiety in my work is manifold. Death enters the Western imagination, taking from us our smallest and sweetest beloved. The calamity is imminent, foreshadowed by the rotting fruit-child, the lightning strike and dead flowers as memento mori. The altars are set, the coiffeurs are waiting. Is it a celebration, or a mourning? The flood is coming, the thunder rolling in, the deluge to set right the incorrigible wrongs of humankind. But somehow it is still a joke. The weeping woman, the reviled other, the myopic self-pity, the cacophony of the dying, the rotting, the lost, and the child-like compete for self-expression. Anticipated tragedy and staged artifice demand mourning and contemplation alongside history and fiction. Despite the faux melodrama, this still theatre of fake grief has an earnestness that struggles to express itself.