I've Lost Myself Completely

Artist Talk followed by book signing April 9, 4PM
Reception April 8, 6 – 8 PM

Exhibition April 8 – May 14, 2016

My work, is a series of color photographs that work to stimulate unconscious emotions, desires, and sexual compulsions, all unified within a dynamic that vacillates between the real and the fantasized. I explore issues related to madness and alienation as they exist in contemporary culture, concentrating on expressions of neurosis, on feelings of anxiety, displacement, and loss of identity. These emotions are depicted in terms of visual conflict through my imagery, and manifested in terms of grotesque exaggeration. While investigating issues related to the unconscious, elements such as eroticism, twisted humor, and horror come across. I strive to create dichotomies between the sensual and the horrific, the beautiful and the destructive; the result, I hope, is a body of work comprised of deeply emotional and disturbing depictions of the unknown, staged imagery that functions on a metaphorical level, and inanimate objects and settings serving to illustrate the inner workings of the unconscious.

Nearly everyone has experienced some sort of traumatic disconnect in their lives, whether it is a severance within the body/self or a break from family or friends. Much hysteria is rooted in such traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into a person’s understanding of the world. Freud, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” states, “Often times we tend to repeat a traumatic event over and over even until it becomes pleasurable.” This repetition contradicts our instinct to seek pleasure but, regardless, our mind has a tendency to repeat traumatic events in order to deal with them, as a way of mastering them. This repetition can take the form of dreams, storytelling, or even hallucination; my images allude to the cryptic mental re-scrambling through which our traumatic events resurface. When I conceive my images the questions I ask myself are: What is the state of normality? How can that normality be subverted, perverted, or generally transformed? When does this overcome the real and become psychotic?