A COPY OF MY ARTIST STATEMENT FOR GRAD SCHOOL:
I am a satirical, new media cartoonist who works in three dimensions. Through multiples, art objects, and performances, I create a rich, quirky cartoon universe in which time travel is commonplace and artists function as part-time superheroes. Much in the same manner as The Simpsons or The Flintstones offer a collection of characters that coalesce as a satirical mirror of society, I repackage the world as an alternate reality; this fictional world enables me to employ popular narrative strategies and mass media techniques to explore, deconstruct and decode social behavior, historical assumptions, cultural stereotypes, and gender relations.
In order to portray a complicated yet convincing personal mythology, printed ephemera such as comic books, postcards, music CDs, posters, bubblegum cards and installations serve as physical manifestations of my invented worlds. Site specific and ephemeral art works are constructed with offbeat materials such as shag rugs, cheap Polaroid photos, fruit, underwear, old tape recorders, and colored cellophane. Depending on the narrative demands of the work in production, I jump from drawings and sculpture to music, video, and photography. To augment the visual aspect of my work, pop songs and concept albums created with musical collaborators serve as sensually hilarious, convincing soundtracks for this world. In order to provide evidence for the stories I produce, I combine multiple new media formats to create the clearest portrait of an alternate reality.
To further assist in my subversion of reality, I adopt a variety of alter-egos when creating my work, including: a rock critic named Michael Brogan, a poet named Wayne Russell, and a time traveler known as Cobalt. I often work with a series of collaborators including artists, photographers, actors and musicians; as such, many of the works I produce are actually executed by a collective, using the rock band as a paradigm. Since the collaborators also adopt alter-egos to portray fabricated identities Ive created for them, this adds a further level of validation to the mythical landscapes I create. Participation from the viewer/audience via live events or process related interaction is also intrinsic to many of my projects; final products often involve listening to audio elements or require actual handling of the piece in order to be fully experienced.
My confrontational quest to subvert gender codes, narrative structures and social overtones through parody and pastiche necessitates the appropriation of techniques traditionally associated with Feminist and Marxist artists. As you will see in my portfolio, my visual aesthetic has been directly influenced by Post Minimalists such as Eva Hesse, Linda Benglis and Barry Le Va; however my actual subject matter is largely removed from their concerns. In practice, Fluxus has been a point of departure, with its mix of music, performance, and commodity. Through their collaborative and multimedia approaches to art, artists such as Yoko Ono and Mike Kelly have influenced my strategies via music videos and concept albums, by producing jarring work that straddles the mainstream. I share some common ground with Linda Montano and Cindy Sherman, with regard to adopting alter-egos and depicting fictional scenarios. Although my work documents fictional scenarios rather than real ones, Mary Kelley, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle use documentary strategies that parallel my approaches to presentation. Finally, in creating a personal mythology, many parallels can be drawn with the outsider artist, Henry Darger, as well as to such mainstream comic artists such as Charles Schultz, Jack Kirby and Walt Kelly.
Current projects include the Celsius Saga, a 7 part, 200 page graphic novel accompanied by a seven CD musical soundtrack. A pastiche of B-Movie plots, Science Fiction clichs and Broadway Musicals, The Celsus Saga presents a bumbling set of space adventurers traveling across the universe to rescue a kidnapped diplomat, all the while singing incidental pop songs. The story is told as a comic strip that you read as you listen along to the CD. This populist format provides an ideal and subversive platform in which to bend narrative codes and explore current social issues such as cloning, gender roles, political diplomacy and the nature of the anti-hero. In another project, the Fruit Floors, I have contrived a series of post minimalist sculptures made of fruit and underwear as neon elegies for fictional dead teenage girls. These colorful, yet unsettling elegies explore the transient nature of identity and fetish our culture has with the cult of youth. Finally, in The Luscious Boxes, I commission models to fashion fictional identities for themselves, and then to depict themselves in a series of faceless, mysterious and erotic boxes of assembled elements according to my secret instructions. In this way I can explore the nature of objectification, fragmented identity, nudity, eroticism and the concept of the artist.
Future projects include LIME, a multimedia installation including videos, sculptures, paintings and photographs in which I portray a mental patient that has contracted a virus causing me to adopt 32 different male and female personalities. Playing the part of the patient on video, I will obsessively create works depicting an obsession with limes. A concept album will accompany the show as a soundtrack with one song each sung by the 32 various personalities I will adopt. In addition, a comic book depicting a group of quirky scientists on the search for a cure for the virus will be published. The second project I have in pre-production is The Ultra Anthology of Maximum Poetry, a performance/ installation in which 25 different fictional poets display their notebooks and original drafts of poems. The notebooks for the project will be presented as art objects, displayed as if they were precious historical documents. The show will be accompanied by hired actors on tape and video, reading the poems I will write, and portraying eccentric characters of my own creation.
Though artistically satisfying and extremely varied, my body of work has been difficult to translate into commodities that are conducive to traditional art world venues. My work has also been too eccentric to be fully embraced by mainstream pop culture venues. My greatest challenge as an artist will be to find a niche that allows my work to strike a balance between the values of high art and lowbrow pop culture.
I am a satirical, new media cartoonist who works in three dimensions. Through multiples, art objects, and performances, I create a rich, quirky cartoon universe in which time travel is commonplace and artists function as part-time superheroes. Much in the same manner as The Simpsons or The Flintstones offer a collection of characters that coalesce as a satirical mirror of society, I repackage the world as an alternate reality; this fictional world enables me to employ popular narrative strategies and mass media techniques to explore, deconstruct and decode social behavior, historical assumptions, cultural stereotypes, and gender relations.
In order to portray a complicated yet convincing personal mythology, printed ephemera such as comic books, postcards, music CDs, posters, bubblegum cards and installations serve as physical manifestations of my invented worlds. Site specific and ephemeral art works are constructed with offbeat materials such as shag rugs, cheap Polaroid photos, fruit, underwear, old tape recorders, and colored cellophane. Depending on the narrative demands of the work in production, I jump from drawings and sculpture to music, video, and photography. To augment the visual aspect of my work, pop songs and concept albums created with musical collaborators serve as sensually hilarious, convincing soundtracks for this world. In order to provide evidence for the stories I produce, I combine multiple new media formats to create the clearest portrait of an alternate reality.
To further assist in my subversion of reality, I adopt a variety of alter-egos when creating my work, including: a rock critic named Michael Brogan, a poet named Wayne Russell, and a time traveler known as Cobalt. I often work with a series of collaborators including artists, photographers, actors and musicians; as such, many of the works I produce are actually executed by a collective, using the rock band as a paradigm. Since the collaborators also adopt alter-egos to portray fabricated identities Ive created for them, this adds a further level of validation to the mythical landscapes I create. Participation from the viewer/audience via live events or process related interaction is also intrinsic to many of my projects; final products often involve listening to audio elements or require actual handling of the piece in order to be fully experienced.
My confrontational quest to subvert gender codes, narrative structures and social overtones through parody and pastiche necessitates the appropriation of techniques traditionally associated with Feminist and Marxist artists. As you will see in my portfolio, my visual aesthetic has been directly influenced by Post Minimalists such as Eva Hesse, Linda Benglis and Barry Le Va; however my actual subject matter is largely removed from their concerns. In practice, Fluxus has been a point of departure, with its mix of music, performance, and commodity. Through their collaborative and multimedia approaches to art, artists such as Yoko Ono and Mike Kelly have influenced my strategies via music videos and concept albums, by producing jarring work that straddles the mainstream. I share some common ground with Linda Montano and Cindy Sherman, with regard to adopting alter-egos and depicting fictional scenarios. Although my work documents fictional scenarios rather than real ones, Mary Kelley, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle use documentary strategies that parallel my approaches to presentation. Finally, in creating a personal mythology, many parallels can be drawn with the outsider artist, Henry Darger, as well as to such mainstream comic artists such as Charles Schultz, Jack Kirby and Walt Kelly.
Current projects include the Celsius Saga, a 7 part, 200 page graphic novel accompanied by a seven CD musical soundtrack. A pastiche of B-Movie plots, Science Fiction clichs and Broadway Musicals, The Celsus Saga presents a bumbling set of space adventurers traveling across the universe to rescue a kidnapped diplomat, all the while singing incidental pop songs. The story is told as a comic strip that you read as you listen along to the CD. This populist format provides an ideal and subversive platform in which to bend narrative codes and explore current social issues such as cloning, gender roles, political diplomacy and the nature of the anti-hero. In another project, the Fruit Floors, I have contrived a series of post minimalist sculptures made of fruit and underwear as neon elegies for fictional dead teenage girls. These colorful, yet unsettling elegies explore the transient nature of identity and fetish our culture has with the cult of youth. Finally, in The Luscious Boxes, I commission models to fashion fictional identities for themselves, and then to depict themselves in a series of faceless, mysterious and erotic boxes of assembled elements according to my secret instructions. In this way I can explore the nature of objectification, fragmented identity, nudity, eroticism and the concept of the artist.
Future projects include LIME, a multimedia installation including videos, sculptures, paintings and photographs in which I portray a mental patient that has contracted a virus causing me to adopt 32 different male and female personalities. Playing the part of the patient on video, I will obsessively create works depicting an obsession with limes. A concept album will accompany the show as a soundtrack with one song each sung by the 32 various personalities I will adopt. In addition, a comic book depicting a group of quirky scientists on the search for a cure for the virus will be published. The second project I have in pre-production is The Ultra Anthology of Maximum Poetry, a performance/ installation in which 25 different fictional poets display their notebooks and original drafts of poems. The notebooks for the project will be presented as art objects, displayed as if they were precious historical documents. The show will be accompanied by hired actors on tape and video, reading the poems I will write, and portraying eccentric characters of my own creation.
Though artistically satisfying and extremely varied, my body of work has been difficult to translate into commodities that are conducive to traditional art world venues. My work has also been too eccentric to be fully embraced by mainstream pop culture venues. My greatest challenge as an artist will be to find a niche that allows my work to strike a balance between the values of high art and lowbrow pop culture.
VIEW 22 of 22 COMMENTS
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Michelle Cliff - No Telephone to Heaven
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
and random short stories by D.H. Lawrence
So nothing incredibly hard, though I found the Fanon really repetitive and Woolf tends to be a little rambly.