My work aims to present relationships between found and personal images, creating a forced set of questions, priorities, and narrative between the paired images and objects. Using a jumbled associative memory, I take inspiration from meme culture, mixtape covers, billboards, action sports, county and state highways, storefront signage, gas stations, advertisements, autosports, internet trash, highway offramps, energy drinks, real tree camo. This visual language, drawn from my experience growing up in the midwest, arrives at a post-ironic sentiment.
My process consists of essentially “mining” for images I find interesting, compelling, funny, or unsettling. Then I either create a digital mock-up to find ways these images might fit together or mashed up to create something new, or work intuitively as I paint an image and figuring out what it might need next. When I translate the image itself to canvas, my process includes a mixture of airbrush and brush painting to create soft gradients in my rendering, as well as the addition of brush strokes to add texture and hard lines to break up the masked-out airbrush forms. My goal is to create an image that creates a new set of relationships between these previously unrelated images that reframes them in contemporary dialogue.
