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A Bit About Me and My Work
My work utilizes the viewer’s familiarity with consumer culture to deconstruct the social systems that shape one’s self-image. Through the language of consumer products and popular media my work questions social conventions, perceived authority, and the manufacturing of knowledge. Social engagement and public installation is key in his process in order to subvert and reclaim the physical spaces and vehicles of communication normally used to perpetuate the dominant social narrative.
Growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, entrenched in the Midwestern American experience of the 1990s, consumerism, with all of its languages, products, and functions, has been an ever-present force in my development as a human being. When we played as children in the streets, we played out scenarios seen on television and in movies. Our favorite foods had brand names; names that we expected would, when uttered, conjure up a shared understanding of the experience these processed and homogenized foods would offer. Even my earliest memories of art making are tied to products of the culture industry. My first independent collaboration with a friend in second grade was our own version of Mad magazine which lampooned current movies and television. My first benefactor, Travares Buckley, commissioned a life size rendering of Freddy Krueger for two dollars in third grade.
In the years leading up to my time at Indiana University I embraced print as a vehicle for mimicking the systems of consumerism. This is what led to The New Consumer project, which placed consumers in the role of the product. I entered the graduate program at Indiana University concerned with the relationship between the individual self and the consumer culture industry that seeks to shape and control it. I began working on advertising images that featured the human brain as a product. It was not long before I realized that not only was this body of work fundamentally the same as The New Consumer (framing the individual as the product), it was also a conceptual dead end.
