| Description |
The work in Deficient is composed primarily of large-scale oil paintings, yielding from two bodies of work that have merged to become something greater than the sum of their individual scopes. The combined body of work is able to more clearly encapsulate the ideas I am interested in exploring. At the core of this work is a manifestation of the struggle between the individual and society. As human beings, we each experience marginalization, oppression, stigma, suffering or feelings of inadequacy in some form. Most often, we experience this based on external forces. In Deficient, I explore the interaction between these external forces and the individual. I believe it is an artificial quality in our society that imposes this sense of inadequacy, creating a sort of soft violence. My current paintings are a metaphor for the reductive quality and violence of oppression. Reduced to its most basic, visceral forms, my work depicts the (extreme) end result of oppression: Human forms become as hanging bodies of meat, diminished to their lowest accepted value. Paint and gore are not far removed - they are both wet, abstract materials. When I apply paint, I am tearing it apart with solvents and breaking it down. This mirrors the concept I seek to communicate. In my work I express my own feelings of inadequacy as a microcosm of the larger societal structure we inhabit where individuals, like the figures in my paintings, battle external forces and their environment in a struggle for self-concept and worth. |
