digital c-prints
dimensions variable
2013

Restrain employs a straightforward reveal/conceal device to explore psychological state that needs to be exposed in order to be established. To create each photograph, I have written down an embarrassing, revealing, shameful, humorous, horrific or otherwise private thought. The thought could be purely in the abstract or could be a recount of an actual event. Once on paper, the words are obfuscated either by erasing, marking over, ripping out, etc., the intimacies obscured or removed. The remaining elements are then photographed adding a final level of impenetrability.

Beginning with the offer of a confessional, the viewer is positioned to learn something potentially provocative about the artist. Since the actual content is hidden, the viewer can respond to the remaining elements. The materials may be clues to what was once exposed. The same is true for the overall aesthetics. It’s up to the desire of the viewer to know to determine the level of frustration in engaging the piece.

At the same time, knowing that the content will always be restrained in one form or another, the viewer may reflect back on personal experience and thoughts of what is acceptable to be revealed in his/her own life. Titles such as Betrayal, Hubris, Epithet, Filicide, and Nepotism act as triggers providing a hint of the works’ content, just enough to pique curiosity, as well as a mental nudge to investigate one’s inner thoughts.

latex sculpture
height: approx. 6
2014

Skinned, begins with the notion that everyone, to some extent, wears a mask and furthers it by blowing it out of proportion.  Consisting of a 6 (to 8) foot tall recreation of my face, as if it has been ripped off, Skinned takes a metaphor, brings it into the realm of the literal only to force it back into the figurative.  Hanging from the ceiling, my face, its pores, lines and hair, will be depicted in detail.  The end result of a violent and depraved act, the flesh is pale and lifeless.  Blood caked at the edges connote the freshness of the violent act.  Conjuring up images from a whole host of low budget, horror films, Skinned will be a cinematic nightmare realized.

In horror films, the villain's identity, often linked to ugliness and deformity (whether physical, mental, or a combination), is both defined and hidden by a mask.  From The Phantom Of The Opera to Friday The 13th to Scream, a plethora of cinematic moments contain the masking and unmasking of the villain, the evil contained.  

Perhaps the most notorious mask wearer in American culture has been Ed Gein, a Wisconsonite who, in the 1950’s, would wear the skinned bodies and faces of his murder victims and the countless others he illegally exhumed.  This event in American history illustrated that what can appear to be wholesome and moral (the God-fearing, American mid-West) can be as depraved and violent as it gets.  Here, the face of the innocent became a fetishized tool through which a deranged man attempted to attain an escape, a sense of peace.  With this shocking revelation, America’s visage was violently ripped away.  That Gein became the model for filmic boogymen such as Norman Bates (Psycho) and Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to Jame Gumb (The Silence Of The Lambs), speaks of both his crimes’ curiously morbid appeal as well as the acceptance of the ideas of veiled evil into the national cultural zeitgeist.

Skinned does not differentiate between the masks that can be removed and our own faces.  We construct our identities borrowing gestures and expressions from others, whether real or fictive.  Our faces, our bodies and our minds can be altered through manipulation.  Once in place, our masks are not taken off without an often painful and violent fight.  We are, after all, what we wear.

single channel video
6:03
2014

    Violence is never the solution…unless confronting a bully. 

    Bully begins in a straightforward manner as the viewer sees “Bobby Bully,” a body opponent bag designed specifically for children for self-defense and sparring. What transpires is a shift from benignly comical to discomforting unease as the bully becomes the bullied. At the hands of a grown man, the child-like visage (no matter how pugnacious its design) becomes subject to humiliation.

Children are often taught not to hit or fight or be aggressive especially toward weaker children. But, this armless (meaning: defenseless) rubber and plastic object is meant to be hit and kicked and otherwise dominated as a child learns to fight. That the fighting is under the guise of self-defense doesn’t really soften the idea that children and, by extension, adults and can and do hurt one another. Can making the object of the aggression look like a tough kid really remove the undercurrent of violence and subjugation?