THE MAIL MAN BRINGS ME MY ART SUPPLIES (2014)
The inundation and saturation of information has led to an ignorance of knowledge.
An absurdity in using an item for its intended purpose depicts its uselessness.
Commercialism has berated and intruded our homes through our mailbox.
The visual chaos of flyers as both positive and negative space.
Using advertisements as raw material and as message.
Humor in the content through formal imagery.
Lots of colors and writing on paper.
Pizzas and Ikea everywhere…
Playing with things and stuff.
The mailman brings me my art supplies.
A MONSTER IN MY BASEMENT (2012)
A Monster in my Basement has its inspirations from childhood imagination. Children have the capacity to create worlds of characters out of objects and places, and then opening themselves to be affected by their own imagination. Fears are a subset of this, feeding off the unknown: when provided with less information, the imagination will compensate with sometimes horrible and violent thoughts.After my own strange encounter, I found myself reconnected with that unsettling, daunting feeling of the basement. Aware of how perception interprets reality, I began a hunt for those monsters that we lose in age.
PLAYSCAPE (2012)
Playscape is a nostalgic project consisting of both an image and a video projection composed of archived media from my childhood. The video projection is manipulated by a program (written in the node-based programming language Max), which jumps between moments that are randomly selected from a bank of archived home movies. This is complemented by a 20x90in digital photo collage of a dozen scanned family negatives revolving around playing in landscapes.
Memory is both a subject and a technical factor in this project. It can be observed as landscape in a way, each element of our past being part of the final, larger picture. Through exploring our past, we can understand who a person is as the culmination of his or her experiences. Both the randomization of the video and the nostalgic cloudiness of the print are emulations of the sporadic, non-linear way in which we remember our past.
The use of personal footage is what originally drew me to the project, but through the scattered presentation of both mediums, the visuals are made less specific and, thus, more accessible to the viewer, giving them a framework of relatable events, situations or locations to enable a self-reflection one's own past.
LIFE IN PLASTIC (2012)
Plastic’s uses are strangely contradictory; it maintains the life of food, storing freshness and protecting for later consumption. However, it does so by killing oxygen supply, and essentially suspending, or ending, life. Ironically, the plastic will be in existence for centuries longer than any living organism.
Beginning as a formalistic study of synthetic material interacting with organic vegetation, Life in Plastic has evolved into a microchasmic exploration of humanities effect on the world. Using plastic as a symbol of human technology, the photographic series is a depiction of its need to control, essentially maintaining nature unnaturally.
Food, being one of our primary needs, is bound, bagged and Seran Wrapped, creating sculptures that are often sexual, referring to the interruption of natural processes of life, death and rebirth. These concepts are echoed in the accompanying videos, specifically where eggs, being symbolic of fertility and birth, fall violently into a plastic bag.
As mentioned, this is a microchasm of a larger idea. From plastic injections into our skin to maintain the illusion of youth, to creating life in test tubes, humanity's fetish dangerously teeters on 3 fine lines: understanding nature, controlling nature and altering nature.
THE OLD GREENE (2010)
At the heart of Westmount is Greene Avenue, its two-block stretch between Sherbrooke and St. Catherine one of the city’s few shopping spots. Unlike most commercial districts, the small and long-lasting stores of Greene Avenue have created fame as well as personalities around themselves. The street becomes a cast of individual characters, each one known as its own independent entity transcending the area itself. Oink Oink, Lapidarius, Chez Nick; it is a rare case of the parts being larger than the sum.
Growing up a street away, the two-block walk was daily routine. In the summer of 2010, a beautification of the street improved many of its facets: the sidewalks are smoother, the streets are wider and it has become ironically greener. But despite its upgrades, there is a change in character, not for better or worse, but a change nonetheless. “The Old Greene” is a nostalgic look at a piece of Westmount and of my childhood that no longer exists as it was, and a reminder that change is the only constant.
