thank you all so today I’m going to talk
to you about a body of work I’ve been
working on for about the past five or so
years called occupants which you see
here and it’s essentially sort of my
reinterpretation or reimagining of a
form of portraiture called occupational
portraiture in which you see the
subjects through the lens of their daily
lives roles or professions before I get
to the current work though I’m going to
talk about some of my earliest
influences and then some of the research
I did into this genre and how those two
things sort of came together to help
sort of create this body work so first
thing we go all the way back to the
beginning like many children of the 80s
Star Wars was sort of the first thing
that kind of exploded my visual
imagination I grew up in suburban rural
Kentucky and I didn’t really have access
to museums or art galleries the sort of
art world wasn’t really part of the
vocabulary my early life so popular
culture was really the way I came to
understand the sort of imaginative
visual world and Star Wars like many
young kids in that scenario was the
first thing that really spoke to me so
when I saw these movies at you know age
six or seven I started sort of
obsessively making drawings of these
characters and also of my own characters
that were basically kind of rip off of
the star wars star wars world another
thing I discovered early on in the small
town I grew up in was that if you went
to the magazine section of the grocery
store you could also discover sort of a
wider world of pop culture and I became
a fan of Mad Magazine I like the way
they would take figures from popular
culture like Yoda for example and sort
of tinker with him poke fun of them sort
of satirize them is I got a little older
I got very into baseball cards kind of
like the Star Wars action figures I like
the way that they were sort of uniform
they were all the same but if you looked
at each one they were also
Oh syncretic the uniforms were different
the poses were different the colors were
different they ultimately sort of all
fit into one specific design again I
liked sort of versions of popular
culture that would tinker with and
establish format and sort of poke fun at
it garbage pail kids would take a format
like the baseball card and satirize it
so early on all of those things were
sort of swimming around in my young head
and recently I discovered this drawing i
did when i was ten years old I’d
completely forgotten that I made it this
was published in my local newspaper when
I was a kid and what you see here if you
look closely it’s actually George
Washington he’s got his George
Washington haircut he’s got his Ascot
but he’s dressed up like a skateboarder
with his flip hat checkered shorts and
his Chuck Taylors so seeing this image
and you know again I’d completely
forgotten that i did it and sort of
struck me like a thunderbolt first to
see just how much those early things
influenced me that I spoke of earlier
but also to see the degree to which an
image like this that I drew when I was
ten still sort of presents itself in the
work I make now as I got to be a
teenager my sort of pop culture
obsession kind of laser focused into the
realm of music and kind of like baseball
cards before the album cover became a
format that I was similarly obsessed
with album covers were all the same but
they were all different they had to fit
into a certain format they tended to be
a portrait of the artist but those
individual qualities of each artist were
sort of brought forth in each individual
album cover so here you can see some of
my early works and I think what you’ll
see is it’s like all those early
influences sort of or put in a cauldron
swirled around and these images speak to
a lot of those influences I think
sometimes the first decade or so of your
making as you become an artist is really
just about processing your
influences establishing what format you
want to work in figuring out how things
work technically and at the end of this
period I’d sort of established that some
sort of alternative form of portraiture
was the thing that I wanted to do and
pursue but I also wanted to figure out a
way to kind of unify it and bring it all
together in a fashion that might make
some sort of a broader statement so I
had to really kind of investigate what
was it about portraiture that interested
me and I came to kind of a paradoxical
conclusion which was I was fascinated
with this genre of portraiture but I
wasn’t interested in individuals you
know I didn’t want to bring my friend
over to the house and put them next to
the window and try to sort of capture
their individual essence the way the
light was hitting them I was interested
in all the sort of peripheral things I
was interested in archetype the
symbology of portraiture the clothing
the settings the objects that surrounded
the figures and I thought okay there’s
this paradox in terms of the way I
approach portraiture maybe I could use
this as an advantage rather than a
deficiency so I took some time to
research at first portraiture at large
and then became aware that I was really
interested in a sub-genre of portraiture
what you might call occupational
portraiture seeing people through the
lens of their daily roles professions
working lives I started to accumulate
these images and sort of seek them out
from lots of different sources and I
realized there was a paradox about this
work as well which was as you look at
these images you can sort of discern a
lot of information about these
characters maybe something about their
socio-economic situation maybe their
geography maybe their place in history
you can probably deduce certain things
about their daily routines but the
figures at the core ultimately sort of
remain a mystery you don’t know anything
about the personal lives you don’t know
what their favorite book is what their
favorite musician is so these images in
a sense
had sort of a mask like quality and they
also presented a paradox so I thought
okay here’s to paradoxes to interest me
in terms of portraiture maybe I can
continue to consider that and sort of
filter that into my own work soon into
my research I became familiar with the
work of august sander who is an early
20th century german photographer and he
essentially made his entire life work
the pursuit of the Occupational portrait
he went all throughout Germany and just
found hundreds of subjects which he
photographed in the context of their
daily occupations and I thought ok
here’s someone that really made an
entire life’s work out of this maybe I
could pursue a similar project but sort
of filter it through the aesthetic that
I’ve developed from the early influences
that I had already started to sort of
seek out in the first ten years of my
making work so here you see one of the
first attempts of me sort of trying to
establish this occupational portrait
format and what you see is the subject
the hunter in the sort of clothing the
object several signifiers in a setting
that speak to that occupation it sort of
suggests some of the earlier aesthetics
I had established in some of my earlier
painting but to me it felt a little bit
too conventional it felt like I was sort
of rehashing this sort of sub-genre
rather than taking it to a different
place so I decided I should ditch the
settings I should stop thinking about
these as circumstances you might
actually encounter in real life but
maybe the sort of human form can almost
be sort of like a surface that I’m just
building symbols on and that might free
me up to take it to a different place
and once I did that they started to
become more sort of overtly symbolic
more bizarre more humorous in some cases
and they just really allowed me the
freedom to go in lots of different
directions while still maintaining this
very sort of specific format so once
I had established that method of working
i was sort of often running what you see
here our paintings that are actually
made from real life models I the way I
construct these actually take a
mannequin bust and I accumulate lots of
objects that speak to any given
occupation for the subject of the
painting now some of them I just sort of
encounter in my daily life sometimes
I’ll seek out objects on ebay and I’ll
bring all of these sort of symbolic
objects together and start to cover up
the form of the model until it becomes
this sort of mask like creature now some
of these objects speak very specifically
to the symbolism of the occupation but
some of them I started to find I just
needed to incorporate to hold these
models together so you start to see
strings ribbons pieces of cloth and it’s
that started to happen I just let that
sort of become part of the language of
the pieces when I first started this
project I didn’t really know how to
approach meaning sometimes when you
start a big undertaking you’re just
trying to deal with all the
practicalities and meaning is something
that sort of arrives later so it wasn’t
until about two years three years into
this project that I started to have
ideas about the meaning of this work now
I don’t necessarily think I’m an
authority on the meaning I think anytime
you’re making creative work meaning
exists somewhere between the maker and
the audience in that space and
interaction between the two but I have
start to sort of develop some ideas
about the meaning of these I think on
some level they are about that
negotiation between revealing aspects of
yourself and concealing aspects of
yourself when you are entering into the
sort of professional adult daily routine
sort of working world I think on some
level they’re also about some of the
absurdities of the conventions and
conformities that we have to contend
with when we’re entering into that world
as well I think on some level
they’re about the desire to belong but
more than anything else I sort of think
they’re about the kind of never-ending
improvisational idiosyncratic
construction of the version of ourselves
that we want the world to understand and
absorb that’s sort of a lifelong process
and you might also call it a work in
progress thank you all [Applause]
to you about a body of work I’ve been
working on for about the past five or so
years called occupants which you see
here and it’s essentially sort of my
reinterpretation or reimagining of a
form of portraiture called occupational
portraiture in which you see the
subjects through the lens of their daily
lives roles or professions before I get
to the current work though I’m going to
talk about some of my earliest
influences and then some of the research
I did into this genre and how those two
things sort of came together to help
sort of create this body work so first
thing we go all the way back to the
beginning like many children of the 80s
Star Wars was sort of the first thing
that kind of exploded my visual
imagination I grew up in suburban rural
Kentucky and I didn’t really have access
to museums or art galleries the sort of
art world wasn’t really part of the
vocabulary my early life so popular
culture was really the way I came to
understand the sort of imaginative
visual world and Star Wars like many
young kids in that scenario was the
first thing that really spoke to me so
when I saw these movies at you know age
six or seven I started sort of
obsessively making drawings of these
characters and also of my own characters
that were basically kind of rip off of
the star wars star wars world another
thing I discovered early on in the small
town I grew up in was that if you went
to the magazine section of the grocery
store you could also discover sort of a
wider world of pop culture and I became
a fan of Mad Magazine I like the way
they would take figures from popular
culture like Yoda for example and sort
of tinker with him poke fun of them sort
of satirize them is I got a little older
I got very into baseball cards kind of
like the Star Wars action figures I like
the way that they were sort of uniform
they were all the same but if you looked
at each one they were also
Oh syncretic the uniforms were different
the poses were different the colors were
different they ultimately sort of all
fit into one specific design again I
liked sort of versions of popular
culture that would tinker with and
establish format and sort of poke fun at
it garbage pail kids would take a format
like the baseball card and satirize it
so early on all of those things were
sort of swimming around in my young head
and recently I discovered this drawing i
did when i was ten years old I’d
completely forgotten that I made it this
was published in my local newspaper when
I was a kid and what you see here if you
look closely it’s actually George
Washington he’s got his George
Washington haircut he’s got his Ascot
but he’s dressed up like a skateboarder
with his flip hat checkered shorts and
his Chuck Taylors so seeing this image
and you know again I’d completely
forgotten that i did it and sort of
struck me like a thunderbolt first to
see just how much those early things
influenced me that I spoke of earlier
but also to see the degree to which an
image like this that I drew when I was
ten still sort of presents itself in the
work I make now as I got to be a
teenager my sort of pop culture
obsession kind of laser focused into the
realm of music and kind of like baseball
cards before the album cover became a
format that I was similarly obsessed
with album covers were all the same but
they were all different they had to fit
into a certain format they tended to be
a portrait of the artist but those
individual qualities of each artist were
sort of brought forth in each individual
album cover so here you can see some of
my early works and I think what you’ll
see is it’s like all those early
influences sort of or put in a cauldron
swirled around and these images speak to
a lot of those influences I think
sometimes the first decade or so of your
making as you become an artist is really
just about processing your
influences establishing what format you
want to work in figuring out how things
work technically and at the end of this
period I’d sort of established that some
sort of alternative form of portraiture
was the thing that I wanted to do and
pursue but I also wanted to figure out a
way to kind of unify it and bring it all
together in a fashion that might make
some sort of a broader statement so I
had to really kind of investigate what
was it about portraiture that interested
me and I came to kind of a paradoxical
conclusion which was I was fascinated
with this genre of portraiture but I
wasn’t interested in individuals you
know I didn’t want to bring my friend
over to the house and put them next to
the window and try to sort of capture
their individual essence the way the
light was hitting them I was interested
in all the sort of peripheral things I
was interested in archetype the
symbology of portraiture the clothing
the settings the objects that surrounded
the figures and I thought okay there’s
this paradox in terms of the way I
approach portraiture maybe I could use
this as an advantage rather than a
deficiency so I took some time to
research at first portraiture at large
and then became aware that I was really
interested in a sub-genre of portraiture
what you might call occupational
portraiture seeing people through the
lens of their daily roles professions
working lives I started to accumulate
these images and sort of seek them out
from lots of different sources and I
realized there was a paradox about this
work as well which was as you look at
these images you can sort of discern a
lot of information about these
characters maybe something about their
socio-economic situation maybe their
geography maybe their place in history
you can probably deduce certain things
about their daily routines but the
figures at the core ultimately sort of
remain a mystery you don’t know anything
about the personal lives you don’t know
what their favorite book is what their
favorite musician is so these images in
a sense
had sort of a mask like quality and they
also presented a paradox so I thought
okay here’s to paradoxes to interest me
in terms of portraiture maybe I can
continue to consider that and sort of
filter that into my own work soon into
my research I became familiar with the
work of august sander who is an early
20th century german photographer and he
essentially made his entire life work
the pursuit of the Occupational portrait
he went all throughout Germany and just
found hundreds of subjects which he
photographed in the context of their
daily occupations and I thought ok
here’s someone that really made an
entire life’s work out of this maybe I
could pursue a similar project but sort
of filter it through the aesthetic that
I’ve developed from the early influences
that I had already started to sort of
seek out in the first ten years of my
making work so here you see one of the
first attempts of me sort of trying to
establish this occupational portrait
format and what you see is the subject
the hunter in the sort of clothing the
object several signifiers in a setting
that speak to that occupation it sort of
suggests some of the earlier aesthetics
I had established in some of my earlier
painting but to me it felt a little bit
too conventional it felt like I was sort
of rehashing this sort of sub-genre
rather than taking it to a different
place so I decided I should ditch the
settings I should stop thinking about
these as circumstances you might
actually encounter in real life but
maybe the sort of human form can almost
be sort of like a surface that I’m just
building symbols on and that might free
me up to take it to a different place
and once I did that they started to
become more sort of overtly symbolic
more bizarre more humorous in some cases
and they just really allowed me the
freedom to go in lots of different
directions while still maintaining this
very sort of specific format so once
I had established that method of working
i was sort of often running what you see
here our paintings that are actually
made from real life models I the way I
construct these actually take a
mannequin bust and I accumulate lots of
objects that speak to any given
occupation for the subject of the
painting now some of them I just sort of
encounter in my daily life sometimes
I’ll seek out objects on ebay and I’ll
bring all of these sort of symbolic
objects together and start to cover up
the form of the model until it becomes
this sort of mask like creature now some
of these objects speak very specifically
to the symbolism of the occupation but
some of them I started to find I just
needed to incorporate to hold these
models together so you start to see
strings ribbons pieces of cloth and it’s
that started to happen I just let that
sort of become part of the language of
the pieces when I first started this
project I didn’t really know how to
approach meaning sometimes when you
start a big undertaking you’re just
trying to deal with all the
practicalities and meaning is something
that sort of arrives later so it wasn’t
until about two years three years into
this project that I started to have
ideas about the meaning of this work now
I don’t necessarily think I’m an
authority on the meaning I think anytime
you’re making creative work meaning
exists somewhere between the maker and
the audience in that space and
interaction between the two but I have
start to sort of develop some ideas
about the meaning of these I think on
some level they are about that
negotiation between revealing aspects of
yourself and concealing aspects of
yourself when you are entering into the
sort of professional adult daily routine
sort of working world I think on some
level they’re also about some of the
absurdities of the conventions and
conformities that we have to contend
with when we’re entering into that world
as well I think on some level
they’re about the desire to belong but
more than anything else I sort of think
they’re about the kind of never-ending
improvisational idiosyncratic
construction of the version of ourselves
that we want the world to understand and
absorb that’s sort of a lifelong process
and you might also call it a work in
progress thank you all [Applause]
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