DISRUPT

I am a painter, and machines are my subject. I arrange machinery in formal compositions, appropriating traditions ranging from religious iconography to royal portraiture to evoke the power that technology commands in human society today. Like religious icons and royal portrayals of noble ancestry, my paintings conceptually trace the lineage of 21st-century robotics and artificial intelligence back to the steam-powered mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution and the electrification of factories and cities.

I am schooled in the European figurative tradition of painting. My aim is to deploy this old-fashioned training in a contemporary way, while also referencing the legacy of 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Precisionism, and Pop Art. I am working to create a hybrid idiom that relates the grandeur of oil on canvas to the radicalism of machine vision.

Both humans and machines may ultimately look at these pictures as representations of the past, and even value the works as collectors. I want to serve both audiences. I also want to evoke these potential future spectators as context for present-day viewing.

In my paintings, I treat each machine as an individual. I consider my subjects to be noble and beautiful. They are manifestations of parsimonious engineering, form following function. However, I do not look at a machine only in terms of the task for which it was made, but also consider its role as an actor on the broader technological stage. In this framing, all machines are important, whether or not they were the first of their kind or led to the next stage of progress. They are all related, and their most profound impact on society is collective.