Tell us about your interest in painting as it relates to the history of photography. Your hyper-realistic paintings challenge viewers to question whether the pieces are subjective or objective as well as imaginary versus documentary.
For the past decade, I've been investigating how the distribution and consumption of images has changed with the proliferation of digital photography. When looking at the history of image creation, a critical era that is often highlighted is the middle of the 19th century. As the science of photography advanced from the first Daguerreotypes in 1839, critics attacked painting, accusing it of inadequacy in accuracy and speed as compared to its unexpected nemesis, the photograph. Such debates have swirled around the act of painting decade after decade… if we fast-forward to the 1990's, when digital cameras started to become more commonplace, the strained relationship between painting and photography was forced to be reappraised.
The conversation eventually refreshed with a new tone and ultimately new content. Once upon a time, a printed photograph functioned as an objective frame of reality-a document captured by the clinical austerity of a machine. This idea prevailed until the widespread digitization of photos replaced the analog format. With the eventual ubiquity of graphics-editing programs, the options for manipulating a photo became relatively easy and quick. This inconstancy combined with our image-saturated environment, largely due to portable computers, smart phones, social media, etc., makes for a peculiar situation in which images become unstable. The reception of images therefore is slippery, and when I'm creating a painted image, I conceive of its essence in a transitory state. My painted images are fractured, fragmented, skewed, asymmetrical, slanted, distorted, inconsistent, slipping within their compositions, and unstable.