Paintings:

There's a passage in an article written by Christopher Bollen on Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken's work in this months Art Forum that I find interesting in relation to my paintings. In the article Bollens states, "Faldbakken dips his fingers into the cracks and fissures of mainstream value systems by effectively mimicking them. Graffitiing the very position of authority (Zero Tolerance) nullifies both the subversive act of vandalism (I will mark my individual insurrection against a clean wall of the institution) and the power structure that tries to erase dissident messages (I'm just repeating exactly what you want). In other words, to circumvent authority, bury yourself in it.
In my own paintings I'm not so much trying to "bury myself in it" as I am incorporating it's process as a creative act. In a sense freezing the act both physically and metaphorically. In the article he goes on to say, This "inherent Transgression," as Slavoj Zizek has written, is built into society's power structure. Amending Hegel's dialectical double negation, Zizek describes the "negation of a negation," implying that behind every negation, a second one occurs to recoup the loss-returning it, in effect, to the hands of authority. Hip Hop itself is a model of a subculture custom made to circumvent authority. It's evident in the music, vocabulary, fashion, and ways of thinking. For me it's the perfect structure to deal with our post modernist condition.