Artist Statement

My artistic oeuvre is diverse: I make objects, installations, large-scale paintings, performance art, and video, incorporating these elements in order to explore the aesthetic object as something that intrinsically lies. In all my work, the main objective is to blur the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, subjectivity and objectivity, and a concrete truth versus what one could describe as a “creative lie.” Through different types of illusion, the creative lie intentionally imbues the work of art with an inability to tell the truth immediately or straightforwardly. Rather, it pulls the wool over a viewer’s eyes to encourage the contemplation of a greater concept that lies behind it.

My video art practice is heavily conceptual with exacting craft and edgy content, utilizing various strategies of détournement to respond critically to culture. Over the past decade, I have focused on developing a political voice with remix videos. Political remix video (PRV) engages a long artistic inclination to recycle materials: The appropriation of Duchamp, the collage techniques of John Heartfield, the impulse toward popular culture in Jeff Koons, the counter-hegemonic statements in the work of Barbara Kruger, etc. By affirming similar strategies of bricolage within video work, PRVs appropriate media with which the general public is already familiar: film, TV, news broadcasts, sometimes even still photography. The video editor exploits this familiarity to critical effect. When one sees, for example, a POTUS in a political remix, he no longer espouses the platitudes and clichés of US foreign policy, the state of the US economy, or other official governmental positions. The new video work recalibrates its source materials in order to repudiate the ideologies embedded within them, positing what the artist holds to be a corrective lens to the postures initially propagated by mainstream media, Hollywood, and other powerful institutions.

This type of video art conjoins the topical politics and aesthetics of deception that my work often engages with other media, but does so within populist, readily recognizable formats, such as the music video, movie trailer, and short film. This accessibility, rhetorical clarity, and the PRV's ability to present alternative political perspectives is indispensable to a politics of resistance as we progress further into the 21st century.