About
I collect, archive, categorize, reassemble, disassemble, reclaim, and repurpose the garbage trail of lives. Perhaps I’m more janitor and archaeologist than artist. I try to give discarded objects a new life. I reconstruct their history, purpose, and meaning. The artworks I create are shrines, reliquaries, totems, altars, love letters, journals, and collections of memories. They are products of their environment. They are pieced together from the detritus of the South where I was born, reside, and work. They are rich, dark, and dirty like the history of my home. The South is steeped in a history of dark personalities and deeds. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil so he could play a mean guitar. We’ve ridiculed, oppressed, enslaved, and murdered people because we don’t like their skin color. White Southerners decided it was a good idea to go to war pretty much because we didn’t feel like working our own land. Our Archangel Elvis Presley died on his toilet a bloated, bejeweled drug addict, and our literary messiah, and arguably the greatest novelist in history, William Faulkner was by most accounts a rude, shut-in alcoholic. Yes, we have a sordid past colored with dark, tragic characters and bad behavior. But who doesn’t? Every nation, state, city, person has skeletons in their closet, but even today the South retains its spooky patina. We don’t progress at the same rate as the rest of our country. We move more slowly. Maybe it’s the heat. We haven’t fully covered our scars yet. We haven’t fully buried our skeletons. Our past remains relatively on the surface. Drive down any Mississippi back road and you’ll see it, feel it, and taste it. We tend to embrace our rich, colorful, and sordid history. We seem to have an innate sense of how our past, even the nasty bits, makes us who we are today. And so the rusted and weathered refuse of Southern life becomes my color palette. Like the uncannily insightful, intelligent, and soulful personalities disguised as backwoods simpletons that populate Faulkner’s stories, the refuse and trash I encounter every day masks great significance. A rusted beer bottle cap becomes a royal wax seal; a discarded and forgotten photograph becomes the centerpiece of a shrine, and a roofing nail found in a parking lot becomes a relic of Christ’s crucifixion. The average, the dirty, the discarded and forgotten can all be elevated to god-like status. Lead can be turned into gold. It’s all about perspective and how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. So much of the trash I find was once very significant to someone, but they lost it, discarded it, or forgot it. Does that negate its significance? Do we as people become less special if we’re lost or discarded? Does our past define us? Are we innately significant and special beings or is our significance dependent on how we’re remembered once we’re gone? Ultimately, my work speaks to our fundamental understanding of the human condition, as well as our lack thereof. What we leave behind can say as much about the present as it does about the past.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2011
Jackson, Mississippi – Fischer Galleries
annual Nude & Figurative Show
2010
Nashville, Tennessee – The Rymer Gallery
dual show with artist Charles Clary
Jackson, Mississippi – Fischer Galleries
The Circus Show
Jackson, Mississippi – Fischer Galleries
The Circus Show
New Orleans, Louisiana – Soren Christensen Gallery
Small Works Show
Little Rock, Arkansas – M2 Gallery
The Joe Show
2008
New Orleans, Louisiana – Guthrie Contemporary
Collaborative show with artist Willliam Goodman – The World of Moe Ffitsle
2006
Washington D.C. / New York City – District Fine Arts (DC) / temporary popup gallery (NYC)
Group show – Katrina Remembered: Six Mississippi Artists
2004
Jackson, Mississippi – Municipal Art Gallery
Dual show with Jackson artist Meredith Aiko Wilson