Fort Gibson, detail
My recent work deals with the relationship between adolescence and adulthood and the violence inherent in the transition from youth to maturity. I’m interested in the idea of transfiguration, exploring events that exist as the demarcating line where a transformation occurs. These events are often violent as in the case of school shootings where a powerful but malformed ideology as well as physical and moral detachment leads to murder. In a more repressive sense, the encroachment of spiritual and academic thinking leads to friction and ultimately self- destructive behavior where the individual struggles to carve out personal territory.
My work exists in a space of ambivalence where the conflicts don’t include a moral certainty on which to be decided. I present the protagonists in an autonomous nature and force them to co- exist without either losing anything that is integral to its essential structure. Through this process, I try to present questions rather than to assert didactic, foregone conclusions.
There is a certain remembered idealism present in my work; in some sense, I view adolescence as an unattainable state in which one is able to consider the machinations of the world from a detached perspective, a sort of outside- looking- in. In a personal sense, this relates directly to the idea of trying to forge an adult life based on idealistic principles and ultimately to my own search for moral certainties.