UNPAINTED PORTRAITS

"Once it has been separated from the owner, a child's school portrait loses its function as an interpersonal talisman, and becomes only an anonymous record of American life, an artifact of a misplaced moment. Each of my Unpainted Portraits starts with this kind of found photograph, which I then modify using collage, paint, re-photography and digital means. My modifications serve to embellish, obscure, celebrate, and destroy the underlying image.

"As a substrate for artistic elaboration, a photographic portrait is a canvas as blank as any other, bearing the perceptible weight of a certain history. In this way, the creation of these artworks is analogous to life itself, which is created from moment to moment in both the light and the shadow of one's personal and collective past.

"This series explores the creation of something new from something that is known, and finding something strangely familiar in the unfamiliar. It examines context as the wellspring of meaning, the nature of nostalgia, the merits of memory, and the character of human connectedness."

Salt Lake City, 2 April 2024