Artwork

A selection of visual & conceptual artwork


Artist's Statement



So my wife has this joke, it’s from Bosnia. This guy is walking a pair of dogs and he runs into a friend on the street. The friend says "wow, these dogs are so fit, so well defined, you must really give them some good exercise?" And the owner says "yeah, I run the dog on the right every day." And the friend says "what about the dog on the left?", and the owner says "oh, I run him too." And the friend starts to pet them and says "their coats are so shiny and healthy, you must feed them a good diet," and the owner says "well, I feed the one on the right a healthy diet." And the friend says "what about the dog on the left?" And the owner says "yeah, I feed him a healthy diet too." And the friend tells the dogs to sit and they do and he says "Christ, they’re so well trained you must spend a lot of time with them." And the owner says "I spend a lot of time training the dog on the right." And the friend says "what about the dog on the left?" And the owner says "yeah, I train him a lot too." And so finally the friend says "why don’t you just tell me you run both dogs and feed them both the same thing and that they’re both well trained instead of wasting my god damn time here?" And the owner says "well, the dog on the right is my dog." And the friend says "what about the dog on the left? And the owner says "he’s my dog too."

This is sort of what my art is like.

My motivations for creating art have always been somewhat naïve. To give people pause, to slow time, to make someone laugh, to elicit a kind of transcendence, to remind one what it is to be human, to use one’s own experiences to do so. There are many strategies: humor, personal risk, confession, subversion, visual seduction. As dark as possible, and further subversion, by appealing to an absolute sincerity, always hopefully folding in on itself. Most art I admire seems to have an inherent quality of acknowledging that all art, and especially the offered work, is a total hoax that offers no help or truths or answers of any kind. It accepts the lack of truth and objectivity and meaning and then starts to slowly crawl back up. I aspire to that. I work to disarm and seduce the viewer for a bit longer than the five seconds normally dedicated to visual consumption.