Tarot card self-portraits - 2022
Miniature watercolors of tribal rugs painted in Oakland, California from 2015-2017.
Watercolors depicting double shadow self-portraits over-top highly detailed 'flying' carpets. The yoga poses reveal postural discrepancies, intersections and distortions of my body through two views. The carpets are a metaphor for Shamatha (Mindfulness) meditation. Both yoga and meditation are self-reflective disciplines that its practitioners, including myself, believe assist in developing greater compassion towards others through increasing awareness of how the body and mind exist in a natural state of wakefulness. In these paintings, I hope to draw gentle attention to the feeling tone behind these two contemplative practices.
Admit. Omit. Permit.
These watercolors were inspired by the daily Slips project and the basic idiom of love gone wrong and lust posturing in Pop songs.
The patterns created in these watercolor works are derived from decorative interior architectural motifs such as floor tiles and ceiling sconces from City Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey. Six of sixteen in the series are available for viewing here. These paintings were created after a year long study of karaoke spaces in Japan that are typically comprised of mix-matched interior design sensibilities. I wanted to take some time to play exclusively with pattern apart from an architectural space.
Watercolor portraits from 2004 of top ten American Idol (Season 2) contestants taken from digital photos off of my tv capturing the moment when they are told that they are voted off of the show and asked to sing a song to close the episode. The goal of the project is to find genuine human reflection within an overly mediated reality show replete with quick cut edits, overhead circling cameras, close-ups and cheesy background graphics. Series includes a portrait of Simon, the judge.
The imagery for this series of large-scale watercolors were culled from multiple video stills that I took of intimate and narrow Japanese karaoke lounges to create panoramic, wider and flatter spaces.
A.U.B. Probeer Deze Vliegers. Het Zijn Mijn Schaduwen/Please Fly These Kites. They are My Shadows is a project created while an artist in resident at the Kunstfort Vijfhuizen in the Netherlands in June 2007. The project included sidewalk chalk drawings on the interior of the fortress where handmade kites could be checked out to fly on the World Heritage Site grounds.
Five additional kites were made for the three-day Figment* festival on Governors Island in June 2008 where I was available to help kite fliers take my shadow for a walk across the sky. Please contact me if you would like to fly one of the kites yourself.
Sites for Singing is an ongoing series where various karaoke sites are altered to suit a new performance/event concept towards the aim of increasing sentimental spaces. Included here are snapshots of Puppy Karaoke, Campfire Karaoke, Karaoke Unplugged, Snow Day, Storefront, Used Disco Balls and Shower Karaoke. The project began in Japan in 2001 and has continued in New York through 2005. Please contact me for more information about each project as well as the accompanying writing component if you would like to learn more about these works.
The video, 'Slips' (2005) documents my shadow morphing against a wall of untreated drywall and intersecting with a hardwood floor in a soon-to-be-demolished warehouse space located in New Jersey. Silhouettes compel me for their reliance on the body to activate them. It is a way to work with identity without the distraction of flesh.
'Shave,' (2006) is a performance where two men face each other and exchange shaves.
For over a decade, I have been making small ballpoint ink and colored pencil drawings in that collapsed mental state before beginning the 'main' work of the day. Usually, I listen to music and drink coffee during this time. The aim of these drawings, which I affectionately have named, 'Slips,' is to reveal a basic human desire and anxiety of intimacy and conformity.
