"Don't Be Evil" (2021)

Oil and printed text on canvas
60 x 32 inches

The ascent of autocracy in the United States is a product of cultural, political, and metaphysical trends over many decades. Since 2008 I have sought to explore these trends through the use of painting, portraiture, and text. I chose to focus on individual human beings because of the importance of human dignity, and the primacy of human consciousness.

Inspired by artists like Vito Acconci, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Barbara Kruger, and Ai Weiwei - I sought to tell the story of the time in which I lived. Yet like Kruger and Ai, I also sought to depict issues that were morally, and universally important. Most of this focused around the negative effects of unfettered capitalism, the consequences of digital mediums, and the existential emptiness that many individuals were feeling in modern times.

I felt the only way to fully describe our current times was through one portrait at a time. With the hope that as they came together, a larger feeling or picture would emerge. A feeling or picture of what it felt like to be alive today. As I tried to do this, I was naturally drawn to cynicism concerning modern economics, modern institutions; and the demoralizing social consequences of each. Yet I always tried to remain earnest and hopeful towards individuals.

Along the way, I would discover that this theoretical concept (where cynicism and earnestness went hand in hand) had been given a name: metamodernism.

Metamodern artmaking uses oscillation between despair and hope, combination of disparate text or cultural artifacts, and a desire to construct meaningful experience to convey feeling or emotion. This mode of artmaking was in part a generational response to the cultural forces that devolved into the autocratic darkness we see today. Especially the existential emptiness many individuals felt in the face of late stage capitalism.

In earlier years, I sought to bring clarity to our increasingly confusing, and complicated times through the use of clear text. More recently, I have tried to convey the complete dissociation of the metaphysical waters around us by scrambling text with more abstract elements. This, along with portraying the individual as almost embedded, or entangled with textual elements is intended to depict our predicament in 2025. One where we are situated within a messy, interdependent world amid a never ending sea of digital information and stimuli.