As much as I know the sky to be blue, I know that if an anvil fell on my head birds would appear and fly around the obelisk shaped wound.
As an artist I internalize popular culture and the semantics of humor. I find power in its absurdity and my ability to push that absurdity further. My influences are my tools and my reality. Every Mad Magazine, Saturday morning cartoon, and Disneyland trip has become not a mere influence or subject in my work but a reality of aesthetics.
The values I learned as a child were influenced by Walt Disney and Disney's subversive values just as much as my catholic upbringing. Subversion is very familiar, a tradition of communication that I take full advantage of in my artwork. It is a technique of communicating that I use through my sculptures to further my absurdity with intent. Saturday Morning cartoons gave me a language that doesn't have much function beyond being a passive observer. In my artwork I use that language to actively create. Mad Magazine and humor itself gives me power to manipulate those sub-versions into self expressions of truth and defiance. Humor gives power to the subject and meanings that are hidden within a sugary coating of amusement.
As an artist I take liberty to use these conventions and devices to express truth in my personal experience with them. I work intuitively and poetically with the visual language of my realities and use the function of absurdity to say things with my work I might have not intended and might not have been able to say.This practice is an internalization of popular culture and the semantics of humor which become a vehicle to express personal truths through the absurd. I can actively use the piles of useless information that is popular culture and entertainment to investigate poetic questions, to look at myself, and investigate where I come from.
