Bannister Drawing No. 1, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches
HEAT
The artist’s third conceptual painting project, HEAT is a series of infrared architectural interiors and portraits in oil examining themes of space, power, labor, and memory within the context of the institution. The paintings and photographs of the project’s first iteration document the artist’s performative interventions within the former Meadows Museum of Art, taking as its point of departure modernist architect George Dahl’s ornamental grand staircase. To create his Bannister Drawings, the artist heats the bronze and cast iron balustrade with a hairdryer, elevating the architecture to the temperature of the human body, before filming the result with a variety of thermal sensors and transferring the image to canvas using traditional painting methods.
Byzantine General, gesso pastiglia with 24 kt gold on wood, 4 x 3 inches
Deepfake, gesso pastiglia with 24 kt gold on wood, 4 x 4 inches
Sun Baby, gesso pastiglia with 24 kt gold on wood, 3 x 3 inches
The Accursed Share
The Accursed Share invites viewers to consider the precarious status of the body in the Information Age and how processes of digitization and globalization animate the often contradictory yearnings for human connection and transcendence. Fashioned in the lost medieval technique of gilded pastework (gesso pastiglia), a costly and labor-intensive method of embellishing sacred paintings with ornamental relief, these jewel-like abstractions translate an historical symbol of the celestial into a contemporary metaphor of the virtual. To build the relief, the artist applies warm gesso with a brush in many layers before sanding, polishing, gilding, and burnishing the gold to a mirror finish, a ritualistic process that effaces the artist’s labor while deferring authorship to the viewer. The reflective surface of each piece addresses itself to an embodied spectator yet one whose technologically mediated experiences embed them within global networks of exchange.
EMDR Visual Aid (Odysseus Transfixed on the Spear of Telegonus), oil on linen and wood mounted to wall, 56 x 56 inches.
EMDR Visual Aid (Circe Presenting the Spear to Telegonus), oil on linen and wood, nylon utility cord mounted to wall, 76 x 60 inches.
EMDR Visual Aid (Telemachus Before The Plow), oil on canvas and wood, nylon utility cord mounted to wall, 52 x 64 inches.
Travels in Ithaca
Travels in Ithaca is an experimental series of site-responsive EMDR Visual Aids that transform domestic and institutional interiors into healing environments for wounded combat veterans. Inspired by the controversial Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy method pioneered by psychoanalyst Francine Shapiro, this work examines modern psychotraumatology through the unlikely lenses of environmental design and early 20th century abstraction. This research-based project is guided by the question, What is the social function of art in the context of the War on Terror? Thus, Travels in Ithaca challenges persistent assumptions of art’s autonomy and undermines ideologies of media-specificity entrenched within contemporary practice. A solo show and panel discussion in partnership with the UT Center for BrainHealth was presented at SMU’s Hawn Gallery in 2016. Key examples of this work were subsequently published in New American Paintings Issue120.
Las Manos Negras
Las Manos Negras was a social justice project addressing an epidemic of wage theft and workplace violence affecting migrant workers in East Dallas. LMN offered paid collaboration, free wage remittance services, translation, and transportation to project participants. LMN ran from 2011-13, generating a mobile archive of Spanish-language testimonies and documents that was installed at Eastfield College’s Gallery 219 in October 2012. LMN was supported by The Idea Fund, a Texas re-granting initiative of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Project partners included Catholic Charities, Workers Defense Project, and the Plano Day Labor Center.