Tell Me Something good
My research is broadly focused on expanding/exploring the intersection of digital and traditional approaches to printmaking, while playfully and humanely challenging what I sees as false binary choices baked in to the way many of us frame our thinking around gender, sexuality, taste, class and craft. By generating a sequence of simple harmonizing opposites I hope to remind people that life is more fun when you get comfortable with a lot of things being true at the same time.
Inspired by traditional Shunga printmaking from 18th century Japan where production of populist erotica emerged in response to a newly formed middle class of intentionally underemployed samuri, I look for parallels with how this relates to the rise of photographically generated erotic imagery of post war America.
What promises are embedded in these images? What do we betray about ourselves with our reactions to them?
In its current form my work centers on the interplay between two very different visual systems. The designs for my woodblock prints are digitally derived, rigidly linear, laboriously hand carved and somehow still deceptively incomplete; while the marbled canvas and paper they're printed on is organic, intuitive and resistant to tight control. My hope is that by uniting these two obviously contrasting visual systems I'm flirtatiously calling viewers to consider the unexpectedly thoughtful richness bubbling beneath the surface of what seems at first like a shallow metaphor.
What might it mean to intentionally reproduce low culture icons with high craft techniques? Why would an artist use the nude figure to attract our attention only to provide so little detail that the figures fall apart in their noisy backgrounds if you get too close? Why would someone stubbornly insist that images with a legacy of secrecy and shame should be celebrated instead as icons of rebellion and resistance? Why would someone choose to use only images of people who's season of peak physical attractiveness has long since passed? Is it possible to make something that is both transgressive and naive, earthy and intellectual?