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How does your participation in Make-It-Pop! resonate with the exhibition's emphasis on vibrant colors, graphic styles, and ironic subject matter?

The work has a kind of contraryness…standing in contrast to most of those stylistic approaches. Rather than large scale, it stays at an intermediate size.  It eschews bright color and insists on black and white tonality. However, like much pop art, the work is narrative and ironic at its core. 

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What are your aspirations for viewers' takeaways from experiencing your artwork showcased at the Make-It-Pop! group exhibition at InLiquid Gallery?

The work assumes a level of knowledge about post-modern art, and, for the interested viewer, it plays a game…asking…What’s this about? Who are the artists? What is this image telling me? At best, the work engages the viewer in discovering a narrative. 

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Your drawings toy with the artist’s processes, artifacts, and personas. Which specific artists did you most enjoy exploring  in this series? 

Well, the work deals with a series of specific artists and I’ll admit there was a bit of fun in developing all the narratives. The titles provide a clue…but I’d turn that question around and ask if the viewer can identify the characters and if they get anything out of the narratives.

The reliance on a touch of humor and inauthenticity are used as strategies to disarm unsettling themes to transform them to something “engaging and consumable”. Can you expand upon how you build these strategies in one of your works on exhibit? 

The work is authentic; that is, it’s not a calculated attempt to make a popular or saleable object. But the work does often touch on themes of inauthenticity and ‘consumability’. So, by way of example, we’ll unpack one of our narratives. We know that Damien Hirst gained notoriety by putting a big shark carcass in a tank of formaldehyde. So Damien made an artifact with no traditional aesthetic quality, but rather as a calculated attempt to make a mark in the art world, and to create a market, through publicity. Our little narrative drawing shows Damien actually catching his shark…something I assume he contracted out to others. That’s a play on the fact that many very successful artists no longer execute their own work…but rather contract that to studio assistants. Here he’s doing his own‘dirty work’. Plus, of course, there’s a school  of contemporary art that rejects any sign of the artist’s touch…art that thrives on a slick, machined finish.  The shark itself is absurdly huge, which is an echo of the huge impact of his artifact and his marketing approach on the commercial art world. Damien is the artist, but he was a ‘shark’...smart and voracious about his market. The shark also appears to be ready to consume a photographer…perhaps a joke about the artwork consuming the viewer, rather than the other way around…which if you think about it, may be the animus behind Damien’s shark-in-a-tank. Then on the right we have this tank that clearly won’t fit Damien’s outsized ‘catch’...hence the piece’s title “Damien, I think you’re going to need a bigger tank”.  That’s a reference back to pop culture…the movie “Jaws” which pushed the pre-eminence of the shark as an archetype or meme. It, of course, plays on the famous line “you're gonna need a bigger boat”. That’s most, but not all the layers in this particular narrative. Each piece in this set, which was actually a series of a dozen or so drawings, are similarly poking at something in the post-modernist art world.  

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In what ways do your drawings build upon or differentiate themselves from the methods employed by artists like Lichtenstein, Duchamp, and Warhol who recycled “low” comic imagery into “high” art? 

This work is a meta-commentary.  There’s no attempt to recycle popular images or artifacts into high art like those artists, but rather it recycles the artists into a narrative drawing that often comments on their recycling activities. 

What drives your personal exploration of the artist trope, including their processes, artifacts, and personas in this series? 

I grew up as an artist appreciating, and in some cases, idolizing these folks. I suppose making these drawings has been a way for me to express some of my misgivings about the mythologies that have grown around their actual practices and products.

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Your eclectic background encompasses international travels, martial arts, business career, and art writing. How have these experiences influenced your perception of the depiction of artists and art beyond the canvas? 

I’ve been through a lot and now I tend to see things from multiple perspectives…interpersonal and social dynamics, conscious and unconscious drivers, commercial and business issues, aesthetics in its various forms and intents, etc. etc. At the same time, I’m at a time in my life where I’ve given full license to my image making impulses as a way to express what I think and feel. This set of drawings relates specifically to my knowledge of, and feelings about, contemporary art.  

Your art lives in a world where art, culture, and media images circulate as a shared vocabulary of archetypes. Some of your past work includes depictions of western scenes, Godzilla, and the Flintstones. Your current works on exhibition feature Basquiat, Warhol, Lichtenstein, amongst others. How do you select which cultural references to expand upon in your artwork?

That’s a contemplative, hard-to-describe process where the images emerge. I tap into the wellspring of the unconscious where the information gathering, sorting, selecting and transforming takes place. It shows up in consciousness as a sense of ‘rightness’...when you get to the right symbol, in the right medium, in the right composition.