Statement

I am interested in the radical possibilities of figurative painting, and various ways meaning can operate at a less conscious level than in written language. Contemplating a work of art, a viewer might respond to a painting while not knowing quite why the images come together. It is this slippage of meaning I endeavour to provoke. To this end, my work constructs personal and social narratives, utilizing fragments and occlusions to represent the dissonance that is part of memory and consciousness.

In these works – as in life – the concept of identity operates as a false friend, promising a coherence that is impossible to achieve. Inevitably, disparate elements are cobbled together into a kind of wholeness as a way of making sense of what is being experienced. This construction of identity is even more uncertain when dealing with past experience, where the events and experiences and half-remembered things that constitute memory are inevitably fused together and recombined. Much as one cannot experience totality, one cannot remember it either.

I came of age during the Vietnam War, in a family profoundly affected by World War II. As a child, I heard my father and grandfather's stories of the Pacific war, along with women's stories of the home front. "The war" was always present in my family's life, with the certainties of US victory overturned during the Vietnam War. Much of my recent work deals with the experience of these wars within the family, utilizing seemingly dissonant images from art history, advertising illustration, and photographs. Forms bleed into each other; parts are cut off – and yet a narrative is constructed. These fragmented compositions and strong colours amplify moments of disconnection in the social and familial arenas, and the relative flatness of the objects surrounding the central players underlines the stagelike reality characteristic of many of the moments I depict.

My hope is that a particular image might link up to a vast constellation of associations, whose symbolic nuances have migrated and transformed over historical time and geographic space yet remain embedded in the image. These intuitive associations evoke personal, psychological truths, or broader cultural narratives.

A related body of work depicts the disjointed experience of the tourist at the vacation spot and in the memories experienced afterwards, and the repressed white Protestant culture in which I grew up, both at home and abroad. In these paintings I focus on the relations between the figures, constructing a visual narrative to convey social alienation through the arrangement of figures and use of color. Strategies include fracturing the narrative background and contrasting graphic and realistic images to create a tense visual dynamic and convey an emotional truth about whiteness and privilege.

My influences include Gothic art and early Spanish apocalypses because of the contrast between the flatness of the images and the complex arrangement of material on the page. I have also been influenced by pre-European Mexican conventions of representation, in particular the pictorial texts that operate like storyboards. Eric Fischl’s images of suburban anxiety showed me the possibilities within such narratives, and I have been profoundly struck by the complex images of contemporary painter Kerry James Marshall, in particular his use of graphic design elements and strong color in his painting. At present I’m looking at work by female Surrealists, in particular Leonora Carrington.

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Besides being a visual artist working primarily in painting, I am a cultural critic and writer whose arts writing has focused on the relationship between visual art and cultural politics. My catalog work includes substantive essays on Sarindar Dhaliwal, Laureana Toledo, Jorge Lozano, Ximena Cuevas and Annie Pootoogook, and my arts writing has appeared in Art Papers, Prefix Photo, Public, C magazine, the Contact Photography and Bienal de Sao Paulo catalogs, other Canadian and international journals, and most recently in Rebecca Garret: Search and in Transmotion. I am the author of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, and have taught visual art and cultural politics at OCAD, University of Guelph, and Bilkent University in Turkey.