A young woman, face slack with sexual ecstasy, rides a decrepit rocking horse; the horse's head and mane positioned suggestively between her thighs. A popular teen starlet poses with her thumb planted firmly in her mouth, all the while gazing expectantly at the viewer. An undeniably beautiful woman touches her lips to the tip of her phallic pacifier-a perfume bottle emblazoned with the word "love." The plaid tie of a schoolgirl uniform serves as a gag, silencing a woman whose livid stare indicates she would protest, were her mouth not stuffed with cloth. My body of work is driven by my obsessive hunt to elucidate the ways in which societal tastes shape both our sexual predators and their ill-fated prey. My paintings are scathing re-presentations of the cultural fetishes marketed to the most impressionable among us. These are my interpretations- both sinister and humorous -of the eroticized chimeras to which some look for inspiration, and others look for titillation.
I am fascinated by the ways in which popular images both reflect and shape the sexual perceptions of a culture. My work spotlights the contemporary exploitation of eroticized innocence as a marketing tool. Within media sources as varied as Vogue and Disney, women masquerade as young girls- powerless and infantilized -while pre-pubescent girls are portrayed as sexually precocious yet vulnerable. Though the sexual exploitation of children is an unequivocal taboo, a survey of the media suggests it is a pervasive fantasy.
I aim to create art that critically engages with the culture in which I live. My largest artistic inspiration, Pop Art, extracts aspects of our mass culture only to throw them back in our faces. Within Pop, the subjects of our selective cultural consumption are reconfigured in order to better command the viewer's critical attention. My aesthetic strategy evolves from that of Warhol in his "Disaster" series; I marry bright colors with disturbing found imagery to create likenesses that destabilize. While our aesthetic approaches possess some similarities, our methods of subversion diverge. Warhol commented upon the mass production of hollow icons through his seditious use of mechanical reproduction. I critique the pandering to sexual perversion in the media, using the slick visual patois of advertising to lure- and ultimately repel -the viewer. I am working to create concretely comedic objects that possess what David Robbins describes as an "aggressive, belligerent relation to reality." The flat, graphic style in which I execute my paintings recalls the oversimplified images and candy-like colors of comics and Disney animation. This is a method of rendering images intended to distort reality for effortless consumption. I employ this glossy style in tandem with unsettling images to produce visual irony. My paintings do not illicit the pleasant responses commonly associated with comic strips, yet my style tricks the viewer into expecting a harmless chuckle or tasty pabulum.