My work is about these things, and many other things.
I search for balance between thought and feeling, look and touch, study and intuition, a space between James Baldwin and George Clinton.
My work consists of paintings, collage, sculptures and site specific wall works that deal with my relationship to the history of image making in collision with images of activism based on racial tension and identity. The work involves a mixed media deployment of flashe paint, cut paper, found imagery, dryer lint, ash, paint chips, dirt and many other objects culled from life. The form of the work is high keyed and optical while the underlying layers utilize embedded layers of photography and texts that subliminally effect my experience in and out of the studio.
My conceptual foundation questions societal roles of race as it pertains to my own ongoing flux of identity. My wife and I are raising a mixed race family. This experience outside of the studio has filtered and changed every decision I make in the studio. My constant awareness of race as it pertains to my family and history coupled with a constant play with the formal elements of image and object making has allowed for work that is equally adept in the language of painting as it is in the language of a larger social dialog. My work is a conversation of formal improvisation embedded with a deep seeded urgency to attempt to make sense of the mess of life.
I recently have been helping my son learn to read, he is in second grade. His process of deciphering words consists of sounding out letters, reading words around the difficult words and scanning images for clues. This process creates a large amount of context that leads to the understanding of new words in his vocabulary. His mind bounces looking for hints for the new words and letter combinations. This is how painting works for me. Using a rich context of material, color, history and perception I search around for an image that emerges responding to the periphery. The works are reactionary to their surroundings and to my own experience.