"Aaron Mckinney, Russell Henderson, and Matthew Shepard, Oct, 7th 1998, Laramie, WY." 2011, mixed media, 16"h x 10"w x 17"d

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“After Albert Bierstadt’s Deer in a Clearing,” Wall piece with motorized oil pump.2011, mixed media, 16"h x 10"w x 8"d

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“Four hundred eighty-five years of U.S. History”
2011, mixed media, with looping video on micro TV, 15"h x 10"w x 12"d

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Beneath, 2011

Something strange happens to me when I approach dioramas. The three-dimensional space envelopes me and I am immediately immersed them, an experience that I rarely have when viewing paintings, drawings, or photographs. It’s almost a loss of the body. I wonder if this response is common…? This series, Beneath, features several 1:87 scale dioramas representing both historic events, and fictions. I’m curious about these diminutive tableaux and their immediate effect on the imagination- as one must shrink down and enter the depicted space. I am also curious about Kant’s notions of the dynamic sublime emerging in the work as the viewer confronts an experience of scale and dominion over landscape. The Miniature is a device for fantasy and a point of beginning for larger narratives. The minute detail and reduction of scale distills the scene to its signifying properties and in turn amplifies those properties. Lévi Strauss describes this effect in his response to the lace in a garment worn by Elizabeth of Austria in Francois Clouet’s portrait, “…the intrinsic value of a small scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.”* In essence, the reduced scale points to and amplifies the signifiers in the image. I combine 1:87 scale, railroad models with garden ornaments and decorative figurines, which I assume, function similarly on narrative and fantasy in domestic space. I would like to take advantage of the emersion in fantasy to create tensions between these objects and interrogate the unfolding scenes, which often investigating narratives of the American West.

*Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1968

In, Aaron Mckinney, Russell Henderson, and Matthew Shepard, Oct, 7th 1998, Laramie, WY, Shepard and his two assailants are depicted standing outside their truck on a remote Laramie back-road. The arrangement of figures freezes the sequence of events before Shepard was brutally beaten, tied to a split rail fence, and left for dead. The attack has been truncated in an effort to allow the viewer to imagine the scene through to its conclusion in an effort to immerse the viewer in consideration of this history.

Regarding, After Albert Bierstadt’s, “Deer in a Clearing,” Bierstadt was a member of the, Hudson River School, an informal association of painters who promoted westward expansion through their “sublime,” luminous images which idealized the American west via hyperbolic light, color and scale. After Albert Bierstadt’s, “Deer in a Clearing,” is a playful and somewhat sardonic response to this late19th century painting.

Four hundred eighty-five years of U.S. History is a reference to the first (failed) colonies near what is now South Carolina. Above the two “Native American” figures is a somewhat banal scene with a woman mowing a pristine lawn at the border of an arid space. The home is illuminated by a television playing the sequence What Makes the Red Man Red  from Disney’s Peter Pan. I recently purchased these two caricatures of a Native American boy and girl at a national home improvement retailer. It is abhorrent that such figures which caricaturize, exotify, and reduce marginalized cultures continue to be produced and collected. As an artist firmly placed in the dominant culture (white, middle-class, male, raised in a Christian home) and availed of all the inherent privileges, I am conscious of my culpability in this practice, as the history of colonialism is a significant component of my cultural history. While it is potentially problematic for me to be addressing issues of oppression experienced by another culture, I see the gallery as a place for contemplation and dialogue. I want to be open to that dialogue.