ABOUT THE ARTIST
I've always enjoyed juxtaposing the culture-industry crap capitalism poops out. When I was a kid, I made mixtapes out of songs from the radio. A couple decades later I learned to satisfy the same impulse by chopping up books. A few things happened in those intervening decades that pointed me in a particular aesthetic and political direction, most notably puberty and the discovery of punk rock and the montage art of Winston Smith, to whom I owe a massive debt of gratitude.
I didn't make my first collage until I found myself on the precipice of my thirties with a few months to kill while recovering from an illness. I curb-scored a picture book of the first 43 US presidents and set myself to cutting out their noses, laying each one over a portrait of George Washington and ultimately forming the horned visage of the devil. It isn't a subtle collage and I wouldn't say any of the collages I've made since then are any more subtle.
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My work in a bookstore taught me books are not precious. Publisher catalogs are filled with memoirs, self-help manuals, and the regurgitated stories of self-important folks trying to get famous. Seeing all that pulp in the service of vanity is pretty nauseating. Taking a blade to the industry is the catharsis I need to cope with living under the brutality and meaninglessness of capitalism. That is the role of art in my life. It helps me process living in this authoritarian world so dominated by cognitive dissonance, callousness, hate, and screens. It's a creative outlet, but first and foremost, it's a coping mechanism.
Regarding what I do with my finished art, mostly nothing. It is a means and an end all rolled into one. Occasionally, I'll do some work for bands I like or give copies away to friends, but mostly I just use it as a way to avoid our computer overlords. I guess that makes this website a bit ironic, but there is value in sharing, so I guess I can make a concession.
