Artist Statement
This series began as a light-hearted exploration of a more relaxed painting style than I normally use. I painted a pair of chairs because I liked their colors and the colors surrounding them. Then someone jokingly remarked how the painting looked ‘cursed,’ the chairs a little on the evil side. This gave me considerable reason for pause; what kinds of emotions were coming from this painting – or more importantly, what emotions did I subconsciously put into it?
‘Chairs’ then became something completely different for me. These familiar household creatures were no longer direct subject matter, but vessels for the portrayal of bigger ideas. Throughout the making of this series, I read and re-read the book “Wasted Lives: Modernity and It’s Outcasts,” by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. This text examines the modern Western tendency to value ‘trimming,’ ‘cropping,’ and the disposal of the leftovers as waste as a sign of progress and success. This ‘out with the old, in with the new’ society trims and crops everything from consumer products, to jobs and careers, to the population itself, and allows no room for ‘upsetters of the balance.’ In short, those who do not have the means, education, or circumstances to achieve social status are told in a variety of ways, loud and clear, that they do not belong.
Although I am quite far from the refugees or the victims of modern ghettoization that Bauman describes in his work, a chord was struck with me as an Artist starting out in a world where visual fine art is but a side note to the mass and fleeting consumption of popular culture. In fact, I’m sure everyone, at some point in their lives, has known what it feels like to be an outcast.
Each painting in this series was inspired by a different passage from “Wasted Lives,” dealing with issues like uselessness, disposability, having no homeland, relying solely on the aid of others, and being shut out from ‘success.’ As I painted each chair, they took on more and more human-like qualities, until they no longer seemed like still-lifes, but hopefully, more like relatable portraits.
This series began as a light-hearted exploration of a more relaxed painting style than I normally use. I painted a pair of chairs because I liked their colors and the colors surrounding them. Then someone jokingly remarked how the painting looked ‘cursed,’ the chairs a little on the evil side. This gave me considerable reason for pause; what kinds of emotions were coming from this painting – or more importantly, what emotions did I subconsciously put into it?
‘Chairs’ then became something completely different for me. These familiar household creatures were no longer direct subject matter, but vessels for the portrayal of bigger ideas. Throughout the making of this series, I read and re-read the book “Wasted Lives: Modernity and It’s Outcasts,” by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. This text examines the modern Western tendency to value ‘trimming,’ ‘cropping,’ and the disposal of the leftovers as waste as a sign of progress and success. This ‘out with the old, in with the new’ society trims and crops everything from consumer products, to jobs and careers, to the population itself, and allows no room for ‘upsetters of the balance.’ In short, those who do not have the means, education, or circumstances to achieve social status are told in a variety of ways, loud and clear, that they do not belong.
Although I am quite far from the refugees or the victims of modern ghettoization that Bauman describes in his work, a chord was struck with me as an Artist starting out in a world where visual fine art is but a side note to the mass and fleeting consumption of popular culture. In fact, I’m sure everyone, at some point in their lives, has known what it feels like to be an outcast.
Each painting in this series was inspired by a different passage from “Wasted Lives,” dealing with issues like uselessness, disposability, having no homeland, relying solely on the aid of others, and being shut out from ‘success.’ As I painted each chair, they took on more and more human-like qualities, until they no longer seemed like still-lifes, but hopefully, more like relatable portraits.