The city is a text being written and re-written, with evidence of revisions in every delicate scar traced on a brick wall. As buildings are torn down, façades exposed, garbage collected and dumped in the landfill, drafts and corrections to the city are made visible. These paintings are a half-written poem to the shadow city, the secrets and ghosts in crumbling and neglected objects, doors that are not walked through but rather appear as portals to alternate worlds
The Waste Land is a body of work that traces the haunting nature of our rejected possessions through a collaged, recycled and surreal world.
At the heart of my work is the concept that our trash is akin to our unconscious mind. When we throw away our rubbish at the end of the week, we seal it into a black bag in an act of forgetting, wishing to never see it again. The very idea of someone else glimpsing the contents of our garbage seems incredibly intimate or invasive. My paintings are something of an act of acknowledgement toward this largely private and unexplored realm of our possessions. Even the landfills are teeming with our stuff, though we choose to disavow it. These mountains of things are a sort of accidental construction of our times, a shadow city built beside the one we live in. I wish to take a symbolic inventory of these things, to claim them as part of our lives.
My work is concerned with excess and with the sacred nature of rejected things. I create scenes of invasion, where the detritus of our everyday begins to seep out of the cracks of ordinary cityscapes, confronting us with the things that we try to hide. I paint these things from collages or crumpled photographs, working from my own documentation of bags of household trash, images of my childhood basement and photos that I take in the backyards and alleyways of the cities I live in.
By looking thoughtfully at the underbelly of things, at the hidden, the thrown away, the shadow side of how we define ourselves, I hope to illuminate the weight which all of this exerts on us. Every era is defined by what it chooses to disavow, but this does not lessen the influence, the unconscious pushback of what we look away from. By carefully painting these crumpled things, I am trying to redeem in visual language that which has been discarded.
