Statement on the Super Zero Monomyth

Painted directly from my recollections of childhood, these Super Zeroes are vaguely autobiographical and partly invented history.  The source material in these paintings exists (or does not exist) in the unreliable film of memory.  All the elements in the paintings are specific remembrances, only juxtaposed and re-orchestrated. They are memories, not of what actually happened but of how I could’ve remembered things happening.  Not so much as an adult looking back on his past but as a child trying to visualize the world around him. 

The kid reaches a transcendental nexus in the act of play, an almost god-like heightened sense of purpose and awareness.  It's almost as if the child has stepped out of the stream of time, as if he has ceased to be a mere human altogether.  The SuperZero attempts to overcome the bounds of reality, inspired by Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch, Joseph Campbell’s hero based Monomyth, and a healthy dose of comic book superheroes.  This work presents a series of investigations into the ether of memory and an awkward state of quasi-adolescence.  They attempt a psychological space, redolent of actual events, the need for states of reckless abandon and alter ego.

Using as vehicles both the hero myth and the genre of (personal) history painting, the figures become at once heroic and pathetic.  They are silly and preposterous, altogether failures on an epic scale, and yet their efforts are worthy of admiration.  There is something tragically triumphant about the boy’s attempt to realize the fantastic, or perhaps it is his super-human interpretation of the mundane.

The Super Zero teeters on the edge of escapism and reality. The epic is discovered in the everyday, the stuff of myth.  Something is masked as play.  The mythos of nostalgia (all that I can remember and much of what I can’t) becomes the Super Zero.  Onward!  Super Zeroes!  Go!

Statement on "Older Work"

I gather the images in my work from two disparate sources: personal images of loved ones rooted in memory and nostalgia and social images taken from media sources depicting recent global tragedies. Although the imagery in my paintings separates them into two visually distinct bodies of work, both the images that are most familiar to us and those that are most foreign present moments that greatly impact our sense of identity. Indeed, although physically removed from us, scenes from around the world deeply affect our personal lives. As we are confronted more and more often by these images they become commonplace and familiar to us, much like our cherished family photos.

The personal paintings derive from common snapshots of family and friends that are framed around the house, often seen but seldom considered. I began experimenting with these images, cutting and moving the figures, painting a foreign character from another source, or drawing just one figure in an airy embrace. In these paintings and drawings I explore the idea of “incorporated identity”, how we define our sense of relevance in the world through our personal relationships. Similarly, the drawings of Lego building blocks present a nostalgic vocabulary of useful parts. These drawings, like the portraits, are intimately familiar to me, and show a deconstructed architecture of a potential whole.

The other series of paintings are based on images of the outside world, those we find in daily news sources. At first awesome and shocking, yet upon repeated exposure these scenes lose their effect and leave us unmoved voyeurs to the tragedies of the world. The comic book format of these paintings, complete with sound effects, allows the viewer to reconsider the sensationalistic nature of the images. My most recent explosion paintings lose their surrounding context and are reminiscent of Victorian portrait cameos, making the explosion more object than occasion. Perhaps the thirteen-year-old boy in all of us may be attracted to these socially relevant paintings which conjure up a little of the innocence of youth.