Man Against Art was an event-specific social performance piece, performed at Indy Indie Artist Colony’s Monsters and Mayhem Show. The performance consisted of an academic-like speech where the artist talked about three instances of recent art vandalism, providing further context of each act and highlighting their performance-like quality. The audience was then invited to come up and “vandalize” the two paintings in order to complete them. The paintings, Economic Property Rights and Cultural Preservation are named after the values that underlie the collective and institutional responses to single-person acts of art vandalism. This performance is a response to these recent acts of violence, attempting to understand them through an extended thought and behavioral process.
The paintings from this series create a scenario where the viewer questions the intention of the artist. Embedded images of various male nudes and body parts from gay pornography subtly change the meaning of what, from a distance, seems like run-of-the-mill abstract paintings. The title of the series points to the integral question: Is the artist expressing an aspect of his identity or personal character, or are these images employed for some other situational factor not yet recognized by the viewer.
This series is a study on cognition. I used gay pornography** as an image source that was unrelated to global climate change (i.e. not using images of glacial retreat, climate charts, pollution, etc.). The exercise was to understand if it was possible to use this unrelated image source in order to guide my thinking on global climate change in new directions. This exercise was a success as it did change how I thought about the issue. The paintings you see here are best understood as remnants of my thought process, working towards these new ideas and directions of thought.
**Gay pornography was an image source that I was attracted to in order to engage in conversation/challenge the value and meaning of its use as I understood it in recent art history.
