Artist Statement
In my paintings, I manipulate and multiply perspective(s) and exaggerate elements of scale to create distorted views of the world. Often these paintings imply a sense of instability and place the viewer in an uncomfortable or disorienting position, looking down from above or looking directly overhead. These decisions derive from my interest in the relationship between how we are positioned (and position ourselves) and how we view the world. My sense is that we can never fully understand the world from any one viewpoint (often symbolized in painting by the dominant one-point perspective), that our positions often determine—and distort—our view of the world, and that we can begin to perceive and understand the world differently when we step outside a singular and static vantage point. These are ideas that I explore in my work. Several of my paintings position the viewer so she/he is looking simultaneously directly out at the horizon, up over her/his head and directly behind her/him. This creates an impossible and somewhat overwhelming experience where the world is simultaneously right side up and upside down. The images depicted—paratroopers, poppies, power lines, and the belly of a space shuttle, to name a few—connect in a number of ways to my thoughts about power, the intersections of humans and nature, and American industrial and military expansion.
I have always been attracted to vast, silent spaces, and the interaction of natural and human-made landscapes. In the past, I have depicted these landscapes from various aerial perspectives. Flying over grids and patterns created by tract-housing developments that stretch into seemingly uninhabitable deserts evokes in me the same feelings that inspired earlier paintings depicting the constant (although not cluttered) presence of human-made structures dotting otherwise ‘empty’ spaces in rural regions of Texas and Oklahoma. My paintings continually revisit these issues, which can seem both awe-inspiring and depressing, a marvel of our industriousness but also an indication of our manifest destiny—the sense that we will not stop until we can go no further.
My paintings have various levels of naturalist representation; some are tightly rendered and others are painted more loosely with nonsensical marks, reflections of the earth in the sky, saturated, unnatural colors, and/or inverted imagery. Importantly, they rarely include human figures, only examples of what we have constructed on or done to the land; in this way, the paintings can be interpreted as vistas of the present—or our current presence—or visions of the future and our absence.