"The Earth, The Face, The Soul"
This exhibition is the fruition of a long-standing desire to pay tribute to my family and home. My family has been integral to my development as an artist, and my success. In the portraits I am seeking to pay respect to the work of Renaissance and Medieval artists including Hans Holbein and Piero della Francesca that I was exposed to during my time in Europe. I wanted to covey a notion of saintliness, personality, and stability in the portraits, making the viewer interested in the person depicted.
The large image behind the works is a conflation of two aerial maps of Maineville and Loveland, Ohio, the locations where my family has lived. Therefore it provides a unique location, home and foundation within the gallery for my work. Those places will always be associated in my mind with the idea of home and with two distinct times of my development, childhood (Maineville) and adolescence (Loveland). Also, it is a reflection of the fact that even though I have been rooted in two specific locations, I am now transient. I am waiting to plant my own roots in a ground.
The viewer boxes or, binoculars of the soul, are a product of my desire to incorporate my training in scene design and a playful exploration of my family. Beyond that, I enjoy the relationship that the viewer develops with each box. The boxes are attractive with their invitation of voyeurism. As the viewer looks within, it is my hope that they will discover something surprising about each person. I hope to engage the viewer more actively by encouraging a hands on investigation of the boxes, breaking the wall between viewer and the work.
The piece as a installation is the fruit of a long meditation on my family, its uniqueness and my place within it. Just as each person in my family can be measured as an individual. Each element within the installation can be appreciated separately as distinctive art object. Nevertheless there is a stronger overarching personality that I find impossible to deny, it is the mingling of the elements that create my family. In the same way, the work projects a stronger essence when combined as a whole. This creates an immediate tension between the will of the individual and the will of the family. A tension I am currently investigating as I develop into an adult. I am in the midst of defining myself on my own terms I gather and reject components to create my own structure as a person. I have worked to create accurate depictions of my family. However, I have purposely filtered so that what you see is not literally my family but my family relative to me.
The large image behind the works is a conflation of two aerial maps of Maineville and Loveland, Ohio, the locations where my family has lived. Therefore it provides a unique location, home and foundation within the gallery for my work. Those places will always be associated in my mind with the idea of home and with two distinct times of my development, childhood (Maineville) and adolescence (Loveland). Also, it is a reflection of the fact that even though I have been rooted in two specific locations, I am now transient. I am waiting to plant my own roots in a ground.
The viewer boxes or, binoculars of the soul, are a product of my desire to incorporate my training in scene design and a playful exploration of my family. Beyond that, I enjoy the relationship that the viewer develops with each box. The boxes are attractive with their invitation of voyeurism. As the viewer looks within, it is my hope that they will discover something surprising about each person. I hope to engage the viewer more actively by encouraging a hands on investigation of the boxes, breaking the wall between viewer and the work.
The piece as a installation is the fruit of a long meditation on my family, its uniqueness and my place within it. Just as each person in my family can be measured as an individual. Each element within the installation can be appreciated separately as distinctive art object. Nevertheless there is a stronger overarching personality that I find impossible to deny, it is the mingling of the elements that create my family. In the same way, the work projects a stronger essence when combined as a whole. This creates an immediate tension between the will of the individual and the will of the family. A tension I am currently investigating as I develop into an adult. I am in the midst of defining myself on my own terms I gather and reject components to create my own structure as a person. I have worked to create accurate depictions of my family. However, I have purposely filtered so that what you see is not literally my family but my family relative to me.
