Bronx Dreams, mixed media on paper

 

I am still haunted by my year as a middle school art teacher in the Bronx.  I think about the kids.  I trace and retrace the failure of our establishment to help them.  I am dumbfounded by the poverty—the way that they are starved—not just for material comforts but for love, joy, and creativity.  I remember the blind witless anger that so many of them carry on their shoulders—and the way that they defeat themselves with it every time.

My consumer, easy, safe, white, middle class life was shocked by the Bronx.  Clashes between cultures sparred and mixed in my mind and before my eyes.  My life was J.Crew and angry children of color, violence and Pottery Barn, IKEA permeated by reggaetone.  My political mind brewed, boiled over, and burned.  There was no philosophy, no spirituality—only mad perseverance. 

Bronx Dreams is a series of jumbled landscapes, composed from digital photographs, scraps from catalogs and magazines, and paint.  I am investigating the Bronx as an intersection between art and pop culture, the beautiful and the banal, meaningless junk and living souls striving for a higher purpose.  I am interested in reframing the Bronx.  I seek to show the fragmentation, the nonsense, the manufactured meaning, and the hope that permeate our current days—but are distinctly distilled within the Bronx. 

 

The Country Between Us

        

Lui Affogare, mixed media                    Heart Land, mixed media                          Chrysalum, mixed media              

 Exodus

EXODUS is a series of absurd paintings.  I am interested in absurdity because I believe that it is the crux between lines of thought and belief that do not come together.  Truth lives within absurdity, beneath the cracked veneer of our beliefs.  In my work I overlay icons of contemporary culture with fables of the past. 

I am asking you, the viewer, to conjure the true meaning of these icons for yourself and to make your own associations, witness your own contradictions, ask your own questions, and seek your own answers.  This is painting as text, but the text differs for each person, because it is your text.  We are all somehow affected by a Judeo-Christian past, whether or not we believe in a God that would make his appearance in a burning bush.  We are all affected by technology, economics, progress, and American ideals of liberty and power.  These ideas and beliefs influence us in different ways and my ideas are only one reading.  This series is a set of catalysts to reactions, not one artist’s soap box.

For me, the driving force in this series is my contradictory need and inability to believe.  I am standing on the crux of contradiction between cynicism and blind faith.  I am trying to come to terms with being a member of a culture that maintains faith in religion, capitalism, science, and technology simultaneously.  How do construct meaning?  I am asking this of you.  I want to turn frogs into martyrs—and thereby illuminate the fractures in our modern world.