My recent painting has been an analytical re-organization of compositions. When painting, I will use a composition from art history and think of the visual information as raw data. I then try to re-construct the viewpoint elsewhere as if I could freely roam inside the painting. This series has been taken from compositions of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s work. The shallow grounds and attention to figure let me imagine the data in three-dimensions. Historical relevancies and alternate points of view, to me, is much like seeing a work of art from another vantage point. Each painting acts as a sample and as an abstract of research to the original composition. Many of the work in the series have a root composition taken from my affinity towards Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy ca. 1607. Historically, this was the first composition to portray all seven acts in one painting, a natural surplus of information. Technology has brought the general community a surplus of information with more ways of obtaining it. My work reacts to this increase in the density of information.
I base my work on the subject matter of social interaction. My work shows figures in a performance and addresses gender roles, sexual tension, and social status. I paint figures in social interaction based on personal experience. Combined with the construction of sample compositions, each painting is a form of research for me. In addition to contemporary issues of political transparency and voyeurism, it is also relative to interactions that have been reduced to electronic exchanges. My work is consistently an anthropological study of common and personal interactions. It shows people and the manipulation of their raw data.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
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