It’s tough to really take an artistic stance when the radical ideas of Dada are employed by companies to sell more burgers (see: Burger King’s “Wake up to the King” ad series) and when the proud traditions of Abstract Expressionism can be bought in watered-down, mass-produced form at Ikea (I think I even saw Laurie from Trading Spaces make a fake Hans Hoffman to match her room). The idea of a sincere statement seems completely foreign to someone like me who grew up watching cartoons that were filled with irony and shows like Pee Wee’s Playhouse which seemed to revel in their absurdity. Being brought up in this sort of environment made it difficult to me to answer questions like “Is this work ironic or isn’t it?” from older critics. My answer always was: “It’s both… I guess.”

I use children’s cartoons and video games from my childhood, along with current teenage Internet slang to create quirky abstract paintings somewhere between Milton Avery and Thomas Nozkowski, where ideas about nerdy subcultures, boyishness, and consumer culture meet.  I firmly believe in the continued exploration of abstract painting, but I also believe that it is pretty dumb and old fashioned. I love children’s cartoons and video games, but I also realize the naïve escapism that comes with using these sources in the midst of international crises.

The paintings are almost like the “nostalgia films” that Jameson talks about in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” a film that uses pastiche to blankly mimic the stylistic quirks of older genres, like Star Wars did to Buck Rogers serials and American Graffitti did to the 1950s.  The Platonic ideals inherent in High Modernist abstraction now become one of many stylistic peculiarities that contemporary painters can choose from to mimic.  Or, rather, the Eye of my Soul is dirty and now I have a pair of retro cat-eye glasses to help me see (but aren’t the glasses, like, totally cool?)

Ultimately, painting becomes a gathering place for things that move me: the cerebral beauty of a Bach fugue, the sweetness of Klee, the tenderness of Morandi, the good-natured “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” of Lichtenstein or a band like The Pipettes.

I want my paintings to be like a great indie pop song: simultaneously funny and eye-rolling in its self-aware wide-eyed optimism, beautiful in it’s tightly composed formal qualities, stuck in that weird place between sincerity and irony.