Statement

I am interested in the radical possibilities of figurative painting, and various ways meaning can operate at a less conscious level than in written language. To this end, my work constructs personal and social narratives, utilizing fragments and occlusions to represent the dissonance that is part of memory and consciousness. It is this slippage of meaning I endeavour to provoke.

Forms bleed into each other; parts are cut off – and yet a narrative is constructed. These fragmented compositions and strong colours amplify moments of disconnection in the social and familial arenas, and the relative flatness of the objects surrounding the central players underlines the stagelike reality characteristic of the moments I depict.

For instance, much of my recent work deals with tourism, and with the disjointed experience of the tourist at the vacation spot and in the memories experienced afterwards. Because memory is inevitably one's own, I often place myself in the image, reminding the viewer that what is being represented is my experience, and my fragmentary memories. Strategies include fracturing the narrative background and contrasting graphic and realistic images to create a tense visual dynamic, and to convey an emotional truth about whiteness and privilege.

My influences include Gothic art and early Spanish apocalypses because of the contrast between the flatness of the images and the complex arrangement of material on the page. I have also been influenced by pre-European Mexican conventions of representation, in particular the pictorial texts that operate like storyboards. Eric Fischl’s images of suburban anxiety showed me the possibilities within such narratives, and I have been profoundly struck by the complex images of contemporary painter Kerry James Marshall, in particular his use of graphic design elements and strong color in his painting. At present I’m looking at work by female Surrealists, in particular Leonora Carrington.

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Besides being a visual artist working primarily in painting, I am a cultural critic and writer whose arts writing has focused on the relationship between visual art and cultural politics. My catalog work includes substantive essays on Sarindar Dhaliwal, Laureana Toledo, Jorge Lozano, Ximena Cuevas and Annie Pootoogook, and my arts writing has appeared in Art Papers, Prefix Photo, Public, C magazine, the Contact Photography and Bienal de Sao Paulo catalogs, other Canadian and international journals, and most recently in Rebecca Garret: Search and in Transmotion. I am the author of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, and have taught visual art and cultural politics at OCAD, University of Guelph, and Bilkent University in Turkey.