People want to understand right from wrong. They want to know what is good and what is evil, and how to separate beauty from ugliness. Humans seem to be drawn to absolutes. Most people try to separate themselves from what the social order deems unacceptable or repulsive, and align themselves with perceptions of beauty and truth. In my own life, I have found myself drawn to the gray areas. These are the areas of uncertainty where anxiety and absurdity exist and cause us to question our assumptions about what we think we know. Through my work, I seek to question knowledge and conventional wisdom about ourselves and human codes of morality.
Any given image or word has either a positive or negative cultural subtext. In my work, I distance these associations by selectively removing found visual data from its original context. This information is collected and appropriated from various ephemera, such as photographs, documents and film. Often, my sources consist of works of propaganda that are produced to reienforce ideas about ethics and morality. From these sources, I pick out certain representations of people and then work them into mixed media drawings. These are executed on gray or white paper, where backgrounds and other visual cues are left out. The figures still carry out certain actions, but hang in a non-space where intentions look vague and meaning becomes difficult to discern.