Artist Statement
My cityscape paintings present fragmented urban iconography and snarky fluorescent color. Each painting idea originates IRL in a shocking pop of color found amidst the urban grays. The painting process then begins with an overall silver silkscreen pattern, which I associate with the ubiquitous, seductive intrusion of the metaverse on the contemporary landscape and psyche. Acrylic paint, found objects and glittery down-market plastics fight back with their resolute materiality. Collage and assemblage objects extend my work out from the surface into low relief, and off the stretched canvas onto the wall. My cityscape imagery eschews reference to the vertical plane, and draws from the street and sidewalk—from graffiti, connective urban design, and detritus. Visual allegiances range from high modernism to memes.
Making art is a form of epistemology for me, it is a way I explore the 21st Century urban environment--an edgy cauldron of discrepancies, but also of transformation. If the downtown Brooklyn sky is colonized by big real estate, “on the ground” there is alternative world building in which I actively participate, and which I consider research for my art work. The funky jumble of my painting disrupts the traditional representation of the urban landscape as a vertical stacking of ground, architecture and sky planes. I replace this genre convention with an incongruous mixed-media assemblage, proposing the cityscape as an open field of possibilities--baffling, energetic and inclusive.