Photography

The photograph is sculptural, transformative. It signifies as any other art, offering the author of its content the same gamut of tropes, from the allusive to the analogical, the quotidian to the recondite. With a background in painting, philosophy and aesthetic theory, it has been my goal as a photographer to explore the various ways in which the lessons of modern painterly abstraction can be applied to the photographic medium, in turn surrendering the viewer to the compositional depth of phenomena at the margins of the view. I take for my subject the unaffectedly immediate, the fit and thrum of the everyday, turning the frame to what's most usually experienced only in glimpses, in passing; unconcealing, if you will, the inherent aesthetic possibilities of the liminal surfaces we pass over and by and through. Variously fed by the compositional concerns of abstract expressionism and geometric minimalism, the resultant images show a distinctive precision and uncanny emotional depth, while evoking the wonderment of the newly revealed in the exposition of the ready-to-hand.

Painting

There is something compelling, even ecstatic, in the experience of contraries held together in repose, and this is the tension that excites me as an artist—the paradoxical expression of a whimsical pathos, a lyrical angst. My search for a medium appropriate to this fervor has taken many paths, settling on pastel painting in part for its association with the sort of beatific image antithetical to my own figurative topology. I conceive it as a sculptural art, mounding up an armature of pigment on the page to carve the fractious figure from its depths. I scratch and smudge, scrape and scatter; I attack until the world within that clutch of pigments yields, and when the seeping image turns my hand to a caress, its parturition is complete. I can't claim that I always know where I'm going—or even where I've been once I've arrived. I am aware, it should be clear, that the contrast between such a painterly use of color and an often indeterminate, always discomfiting figural content may put viewers on edge, but it's my intent that such unease should yield to the pleasures of a synaesthetic bafflement, a transcendence of the common precepts one brings to the act of viewing itself. In the end it's this potential to effect a shift—even a momentary shift—in the awareness of the auditor that I hope my work will compel.