Artist Statement
My work explores the pictorial evolution of fluidly designed, non-deterministic, synthetic figures isolated from prior contexts or specific narratives. In fictive spaces, they float detached, provoke contemplation, and tolerate ambiguities of meaning. And since all cultural artifacts are already immortal, such figures endure a high degree of mutability via an open-ended exploration of alternative anatomies, driven by what Stephan J. Gould described as “punctuated equilibria”.
But these drawings are not merely an exercise in programable formulae or rational introspections, they are also about playfully exploring anomalous variations idiosyncratically as part of a cosmos that is always busy generating and extinguishing an endless array of different forms.
With my archaic genes and primate emotions I recognize this historically recent cosmology, where humanity has come to understand, and at times disbelieves, that everything is a speck inside a speck inside speck. In the history of all humanity, mine is the first generation to see the Hubble Deep Fields. Mine is the first generation to play with thousands of plastic toys. Mine is the first generation to have seen millions of images within a single lifetime. Mine is the first generation to contemplate a pre-post-human existence.
As I draw, figures rise and fall behind the picture plane, called to the surface by the sound of my pencil. They are drawn out, like blood from a vein, or fish from the sea. We get what we get.
While such figures may seem animated or numinous, I recognize that they have no living organs, senses, or tissues. They are akin to ceramic sculptures, which are fragile, durable, and morphologically plastic. Within the pictorial womb that bore them, the figures are perfectly adaptable to cycles of forming and reforming within a universe thatis marvelously unstable, persistent, and sublime.
These drawings challenge canons of proportion underlying historic ideals of beauty while questioning societal notions about depictions of monstrousness.
Being able to draw, to extract imagery from dust, is a personal privilege which must come to an end. Since drawings always unfold in time, the eccentric rhythms of my mark-making are a clock ticking to the eventual loss of my being. Thus, as figures coagulate within their pictorial spaces, they ‘die out’ or mutate as part of a drawing process that is both ongoing and time limited. Once time is removed from a drawing it is finished and becomes a fossil remnant where some things are preserved while most things, like emotions, thoughts, and memories, are not.
Unlike humans, the figures in my drawings are flat pictorial constructs which physically endure loss and change dispassionately while also allegorically reflecting the larger world in which cycles of growth and decay balance the character of all living beings.
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