statement
Long before people were trained to blow up planes with their underwear and 2012 hysteria inspired bad Hollywood cinema, I have been interested in the idea that we are powerless against our surroundings. I aim to conjure narratives in my work that refer to attempts to stabilize an environment that cannot be fully comprehended.
My most recent project is a suite of works I refer to as "The Most Beautiful Things in the World." I investigate with these works a fictional, anachronistic world in which religious, government, and social institutions appear homemade and colloquial. These images of rustic, vernacular tools of judgment and punishment suggest that the administration of authority is a polite, domestic, and eccentric affair. This imagined culture might decide the fate of its citizens by the same criteria with which they arrange their lawn ornaments, and the instruments of this decision-making are amusing and entertaining to all but the victims.
I paint my imagery with an economical, graphic stroke and a limited but sophisticated color palette. I intend to temper the weight of the subject matter with seductive color and pattern, and to distill into playful near-abstraction the imagery of a fabricated culture and its foolish, misguided efforts to clumsily beautify its means of control.
bio
born: 1972, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
education
MFA 2001, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BFA 1995, York University, Toronto
selected awards/honors
residency, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs NY, 2012
Propeller Fund grant, 2011
residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach FL, 2009
selected solo or two-person exhibits
Lock the Doors, Slow, Chicago, 2011
No substantial advantage to mankind, Kasia Kay Art Projects, Chicago, 2009
Sensible, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto, 2008
A Little Present For Friends and Friendly People: In the Form of a Miscellaneous Discourse by a Poor Illiterate Mechanic, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto, 2006
selected group shows
Gang of Nine, Research House for Asian Art, Chicago, 2012
Archival Impulse, Gallery 400, Chicago, 2011
Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, 2010
Environments, Cain Schulte Gallery, San Francisco, 2010
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