2022
FORGOTTEN, REDUX
A reimagining, reconstruction, mythology based on historical reference & exaggeration of Las Vegas themes, history, entertainment and gaming entities, infrastructure, architecture of signs, relationship between state, culture, & commerce. Redux: “brought back, restored.” Show looks at things that can be forgotten to history or forgotten and right in front of us, ex. Info behind signs, support structures, how the subtlety of a hue can cause an atmospheric intervention. Ideas on what makes this city different, ever-changing, w/ evolving societal/ environmental concerns.
The AIR7 program is made possible by presenting sponsors Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support provided by the Juhl, Laci Cerrone (@lasvegasgal), and James Stanford and Lynn Morris.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a queer conceptual artist imagining new worlds to examine relationships between architecture, power, freedom, and control. I am interested in the mask of stability, the anxiety of impermanence, and the subliminal threshold of the unknown. I use these guiding sources of introspection to create work that is both autobiographical and uniquely autonomous.
I collide the architectural styling of American governance and extractive-industry with vibrant colors to underline the disturbing nature of our self-driven and socially-interwoven surveillance state. I utilize symbolism within both contemporary pop culture and art historical reference to create complexity, contradiction, narrative, and multi-layered metaphor, within individual works of art and design. I embed the physiognomy of human posture and personality and employ the lowest-common-denominators of form in compositions that are inherently familiar and yet uncanny, to create perception challenging painting and sculpture.
Converging brutalism, classicism, neo-cubism, and minimalism, among others; I create a conglomerate sensibility, as part of my visual language, that encapsulates humanity's industrious progression toward catastrophic dystopian meltdown of the anthropocene. By producing sculptural and installation works with a sense of imbalance and interruption, I activate space, implicate the audience as performers, and challenge hierarchical spatial and political relationships. Through a process of queering geometry and iteration, I develop forms that are bold, daring, empowered, jarring, and at times unsettling. I interlace my experiences of instability as a queer youth in our panopticon-society by arranging forms that evoke a feeling of uncertainty and simultaneous strength. I connect historically masculine and feminine angles and facets while appropriating iconography that is innately connected to societal control, as a method of subverting both power and social-expectation of: form, function, gender, hierarchy, maintenance, order, and value.
