Flesh and Bones...

*a first solo show! tell your mom and bring your sister if you can't handle it.

...Ladies und Gentlemen...drop your pissroom bait
And make sure you're not late, you tramps and lunatics.
Here's A trick that's gonna make you
Click.

-Marilyn Manson



*cyanotype on canvas








*chromogenic print





*chromogenic print


~MaNiFeSTo:

Working within the realms of image making and immersive installation, I have become increasingly interested in the notion that “objective” representation is one of the most pernicious myths to ever plague humanity’s understanding of the world. Initially, employed as the handmaiden of this ideology, the camera and its ensuing photographs ushered in an entirely new era of technocratic domination. This method of recording reality simultaneously serves to establish the fabricated reflection of a machine and is used to further legitimize an institutionally ordered world. The camera in this respect is not a neutral tool for documenting “truth,” but rather a panopticon which enforces a system of values founded upon the acceptance of its gaze. Controlling the images behind an idea is a means to reinforce its authority. I am deeply interested in exploring this potential for the image and art experience to exist as a discursive site for power utilized within the realms of knowledge production. I believe this power dynamic is irrevocably present at the heart of photographic production and reproduction. With the image as an arbiter of value, “the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.”1

In my body of “environmental portraits,” I am seeking to address the existential crisis of subjectivity in relation to one’s personal understanding and connection with the Other. In each image, the Subject’s face is physically cropped out of the frame, isolating the body in a specific space. Without the ability to connect a complete facial identity to the person depicted, the viewer is instead forced to construct a persona based on body language, personal objects, and anything that one may glean from the mis-en-scene of the Subject’s domestic space. I am interested in investigating this sliding of the universe away from the individual in an attempt to probe the objectifying nature of another’s gaze at a Subject unable to return the look.

My “Flesh and Bones” series is a direct visual interfacing of both the external and internal structures of the body. In examining humanity’s tissue, these images serve as a simultaneous viewing of the exterior human visage in conjunction with the interior aesthetics of x-ray and endoscopic imaging. Immersed and often subsumed by the medical-visual codification of physical malady, the subject’s internal characteristics are laid bare and made public, forcing us into a confrontation with the intimate sliver of an unseen doppelganger. Operating within the visual lexicon, representation is an incision made by the Foucaultian blade of institution, which peels back the veneer of our external projections, literally cutting to the bone in its attempt to diagnose, prescribe, and control both creature and culture.

By subverting “the (modern) belief in vision as a privileged means of access to certainty and truth,” images may be constructed to challenge the viewer’s dominant perceptual paradigm.2 In this way we may realign, re-asses, re-conceptualize, and reflect on the manner in which we apprehend our reality, ourselves, and others.

1. Jean Baudrillard, qtd. in “The Crisis of the Real: Photography and Postmodernism,”
Andy Grundberg
2. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”

farm birds...

*stone lithograph on rile target

(on view at W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery
Cal Poly Pomona. mar. 18 - may 1.)


...she focuses on something...that's how she destroys it. intelligent?...oh, she's a nice girl...just not the sharpest razor to cut yourself with. ... let me keep your hands warm, she said as she closed her thighs. i'll do my best to do the same. ... Beautiful in Black...and you don't meat nice girls at the pub either.

cuTTiNg iN...

*photo-transfer, synthetic lithograph on paper






" viv*i*sec*tion\...n...1: the cutting of or operation on a living animal usu. for physiological or pathological investigation;broadly : any form of animal experimentation esp. if considered to cause distress to the subject 2: subjection to minute or pitiless examination or criticism " - webster's third new international unabridged dictionary and seven language dictionary, vol. 3


1. We're the LOW ART GLOOMINATI
And we aim to depress - Marilyn Manson
2. I always believed that God would destroy L.A. for its sins. Finally, I realized
that He had already destroyed it, and then left it around as a warning.
-Lewis Baltz

man truly is a bad animal...
one thousand four hundred fifty dollars for six inches by nine inches. rough with pencil drawing beneath. t-shirt available. silk screened g-stings for the ladies next time. custom hand-pulled resin anal beads. a guaranteed perfect fit. we may as well be shoving it up our asses. why should low art be allowed to command this amount and Hussar and Robert Williams aren't in most of the real church's permanent collections? never-mind the animal in the image: the shitty price-tag was a knife in the back of the art realm: the low-brow, the gallery, the patron, the viewer, the artist. the rhetoric of smallness. an implied rarity among commodities, as if the object was a treasure in light of its size. as if what it lacked in surface area it made up for in depth. a bad excuse. a dirty joke.

D-Con Pasadena Toy Time 2009

*custom bric-a-brac clearance owl (3.5 in.)


it was a fun, worth while experience, especially if you were a retailer and not an independent artist. but we know all this by now - moot points accepted. the only "toy" related object i've painted, for posterity's sake. maybe if i made a few thousand of them and had a slick box to put it in?

JA's birthday present.

always hearing the owls are not what they seem. this kinky rock god only had two strings left when he came off the stage. the hieronymus heart ache of our heroine hero hides a heinous ridiculousness beneath it's thick hide. visions of early mourning tea pulled through a glass siphon. baby, this little wing sleeps under a red house.

what rough beast slouches back toward the drawing board...

*monoprint with stencil, photo-transfer, hand coloring



the body and mind :: the brain and the spirit
two abusive parents living on opposite poles of a scorched earth, continually beating the life out of their impoverished, illegitimate, sociopath stepchild, science. the one made a pile of numbers out of all they could see, the other never saw the tank approaching. do i cease being me when my neurotransmitters shut down? do you feel when you sleep? does the world die when you shut your eyes on it? why can't we be more than the blood running through plaque encrusted gelatinous tubes? what if gray matter was a muscle instead? what does it mean to find neurons in heart tissue? it can be argued quite well that all our "emotions", "feelings", etc. are simply sensations produced by the excretion of hormones produced from glands in the brain, released into the bloodstream, coursing through the circulatory system, prompting somatic responses, the firing of neural synapses. so what/who am i? where are we willing to place control? i can still see that bug-eyed frenchman looking through the keyhole as a tear crawled down his face. what now? i hear atlas only shrugged. "one beats the dog one loves best."

1. the worm is in man's heart. that is where it must be sought. -Albert Camus
2. who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. -Walter B. Gibson
3. the field cannot be well seen from within the field. -C.S. Lewis
4. i shall never be a consciousness watching itself -Therapy?
5. unless you have lightning in your heart you cannot possibly understand. -Friedrich Nietzsche
6. the heart is pointed down -The Smashing Pumpkins
7. the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. -Blaise Pascal

dis-associated press....or, marvin strikes again

*photo-transfer, letterpress on paper


deconstructed and recontextualized to pleasure your propaganda palette. what does the newspaper really say? let us not be so naive. you're gonna need more than that coffee to wake up.

the glory hole is in your head...

*temporary installation, university restroom


in case you didn't have restroom insecurities before...this time the joke's in the wall, not your hand. you won't get no glory on that side of the hole...

holy francisco A.P.E. - jumpstarting the roadless travel

*photo-transfer, letterpress on paper

post APE post! it's been over a year and the goth-emo quote of the day: a birthday means you're just a years worth of heart beats closer to your own death. re-kindling the embers of a sandy fire, blowing down the highway to put dust in the bowl and carry back the coals from san francisco. while the radio screams HELP! through the haze we look to the trees for the blossoms of yesterday. the good doctor was wrong. the road isn't dead yet.

roLL cReDiTs

when words aren't enough...the day comes when the screaming inside your own cytoplasm is so loud, any more breath spent on shining shoes roars a scream louder than the mob growing inside your matriarch.
we start out in a dark pit ::
it's only fitting we lie in one at the end.
there's a reason we come out screaming.
happy birthday.