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Artist's Statement

My practice is centred around excavating an emotional state in between memories and my imagination. Those two factors create a cerebral purgatory which I illustrate with the characteristics of oil painting that distinguish it as its own medium. I reference family photo sources for most of my works. What draws me towards a photo source are the textural aspects of the image, composition, and the physical state of a photo as a document. Why I’m drawn to those aspects is because they unintentionally make the viewer aware of the image as a photo rather than a frame for the subject matter, which is an aspect of painting that I’m deeply aware of in my process. The photos in particular are of familiar places taken by family members who both are gone, sometimes before my time. They exist only in pictures now along with the wilted characteristics of a photo. 

I’m informed by the artists Edvard Munch and Peter Doig. Both artists' use of revisited motifs is a strong influence on my work. The motifs I’m drawn to relate to the depictions of animals and mythology in older fine arts mediums and the way they serve as analogies for a specific state of mind, emotion or concept. For example, the George Stubbs painting “A Lion Attacking a Horse” from 1765 is an analogy of the sublime and was a strong influence towards my artistic practice. The more repeated they become the more the subjects have an agency of their own unlike the language that had been established around them. These motifs are ghosts of painting’s history, much like the photos I use are ghost-like in my family.  

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