My Story
I currently like to think of myself as painting at the end of empire. To me, that means using drawing and painting to explore publicly available images that make up our visual culture and reveal our collective memories and mythologies. My goal is to create embodied experiences with paintings, drawings, and instillations that explore the ideologies and unseen forces that shape public thought, dialogue, and and behavior. By committing to understanding our historical moment and bearing witness to each other’s lives, we claim our ability to imagine better futures together.
Previous exhibits include a PAINTING//WAR, at Scarlows Gallery, GREENHORN, at ART 321 and PROPOSITIONS at the Nicolaysen Art Museum. I have also contributed to group exhibits including Supplanted (2019) and the 2019 Senior Retrospective at Covenant College, Georgia, and The Nicolaysen’s 2019 and 2020 Annual Art Auctions.
Statement
My paintings explore how competing ideologies create, circulate, and display images designed to control zones of conflict. In each painting, I question the unseen forces determining the creation of digitally circulated photos and how they attempt to shape public thought, belief, and action.
I reveal metanarratives’ competing motivations by painting from multiple perspectives (a war photographer’s lens, a military spy plane, a videogame screenshot, a cell phone photo). I seek ways to undermine heroic utopian visions through experiments with digital and analog manipulations and abstractions.
The results are paintings that explore the fractures and mergers of polarities-public and private, violent and peaceful, mundane and sublime- as springboards of possibility leading to unexpected transformations and new imaginative horizons.
My interest in photojournalism began in an undergraduate art history course during a discussion of Frank Capa’s photograph, Falling Soldier (1936). The picture appeared to capture the moment of the soldier’s death with both intimacy and veracity. I was shocked to learn that Capa most likely staged the photo miles from the front lines.
These lessons resonated with my work as a public affairs specialist for the Army National Guard. During my training from 2019-2020 at the Defense Information School (DINFOS), military instructors directed us to write articles and publish images under the journalistic principle of “maximum disclosure, minimum delay.” Simultaneously, they taught us a hidden curriculum that prioritized creating content that would show the US Army in its best possible light. We were taught to frame each narrative around approved talking points, control the backgrounds of photos so as not to reveal government secrets, and edit out the faces of special government operatives. This fueled my fascination with the methods special interest groups use to manipulate public discourse and deceive their audiences.
In my most recent paintings, I explore images taken from the ongoing war in Ukraine. Starting in February 2022, I began collecting various images generated by the conflict. Through my research and painting process, I explored which images were captured (and which weren’t), how they were shared, and what impact they could have on their subjects and audiences.