The majority of shared images in American popular culture are not an unbiased record of experiences and events, but a deliberate construct, an authored history of people and places, particularly with regard to celebrity representation. In line with this, and in an attempt to emulate it, people have become more adept at constructing their own identities. With increasing access to tools for photo manipulation and highly edited sharing on social media, what was once the dominion solely of celebrities has become available to all, blurring the lines between real and imagined in a far broader cultural context.

By its nature, idealization denies the “unpleasant”. It constructs new narratives that adjust the picture of lived experience to reflect only “beauty” and “perfection”, unmarred by boredom, anger, sadness, irregularity or anxiety. A more complete composite naturally includes painful personal and interpersonal complexity, physical irregularity, and other manifestations of the “non-ideal”. Still, the tendency of American media culture is to project an inoffensive version of minimized complexity to the exclusion of all other representation, editing out experiences, images, and words that interrupt the perception of flawlessness. This pervasive exclusion of the “imperfect” leaves those who find no reflection of their own bodies and experiences (in other words, the majority) feeling unworthy of representation and, simultaneously, compelled to create an identity that aligns with idealized expectations.

Deriving as they do from paparazzi photos - photos already removed from the controlled environment of a studio and post-production fix-ups - the paintings in this series explore the relationship between complex experiential reality and contrived, simplistic cultural fantasy. Paparazzi photography holds a fascination for me because it takes control out of the hands of the subject, providing a glimpse of un-staged, unguarded moments - like a glitch that inadvertently shows the mechanism behind a stage production, or like a candid photo of one’s self.

In my paintings, I selectively maximize & minimize qualities from a photograph (or collaged photographs) to elevate the sense of “reality” that naturally occurs outside the bounds of constructed fantasy. I paint known public figures in a style that renders them both familiar and unfamiliar, altering defining characteristics in an attempt to acknowledge and obscure the sense of familiarity that non-celebrities are encouraged to cultivate with celebrities. Lastly, I paint in a deliberately paced and minutely detailed style to disrupt the established cycle of images generally meant for rapid consumption & disposal.