Pittsburgh Artist Registry

We fail.  Our failure is embodied in the museums where we stand transfixed before incomplete and derelict antiques that reflect our inability to create any tangible and lasting monuments to commemorate our once significant achievements.  Guilt, shame and all aspects of failure are intrinsic and predominate aspects of the human condition.  This body of work treats images as a text that can be read through the implied narratives arriving from the number of signifiers and juxtapositions contained within the artwork. In this way, content is ever-expanding in the work in that associations and meaning will be revealed if a viewer chooses to research the source materials.  We live in an image-based world, and each of us carries around a visual encyclopedia in our mind.  My work takes advantage of these sets of visual cues each of us owns.  Focusing primarily on the masculine condition, these artworks comment on the gap between stereotypes of masculinity and its reality of uncertainty and doubt.  Vague statements and specific cultural references address how we perceive masculine roles and how that tradition has been used to instill socially conditioned responses to gender and power. This work stresses how men’s identities are not the result of monolithic confidence but the sum total of disappointments, setbacks, and learning.