While the carnival, circus, and sideshow have a time-honored, symbolic resonance, I conceive each outsider, clown and freak as a fully articulated individual. Under the makeup, tattoos and clinical malformations are persons drawn from history and life models. The image of the anomalous person presents a sympathetic identification both feared and compassionate.

I draw upon a stream of art history from the religious and mythological imagery of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to present-day outsiders and visionaries. My scenes are generally overflowing with figures and traces of imaginary pastoral landscapes, combining realism with notes of primitivism and children's scrawls. Figures subjected to violence in my work transcend pain as the saints did in medieval art. As in classic religious and comic imagery, violence appears harmless, either transcended by a fullness of spirituality or ignored because of some uncanny invulnerability. Figures with physical and mental anomalies can celebrate their differences and overcome their traumas in a pastoral utopia. As a result, my characters can display themselves in physical exhibitionism. The scenes take place in a garden where humans and animals intermingle, and differences and sufferings are transcended. Separate dimensions interpenetrate, figures of different scales enter each other's spaces, and foregrounds and backgrounds merge. There's a sense of an allegory which cannot have a literal meaning.

When seeing persons who appear grotesque, whose contours or skin patterns are just far enough outside the norm, whether created by choice or by birth, viewers can feel both sympathy and fear. The sympathy can be pity for the persons who are assumed to be suffering because of their differences, although they might not be suffering at all. There can also be a compassionate sense of common humanity, that despite our differences, we're essentially alike. Any concern that viewers have of being outsiders themselves, which seems to be surprisingly universal, results in identifying with these anomalous persons. The opposite tendency is to fear and deride those who are different, and to reassure ourselves that we are not like them after all. This tension between sympathy and derision gives the threatening or comic grotesque its fascination to me.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2003
» Willliamsburg Art & Historical Center, "Brave Destiny", Brooklyn, NY, NY

2000
» La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

1999
» Cybersapiens, 406 West 31 Street, NY, NY
» Madvine Studios, 197 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY, NY
» Artstudio, 48 Eagle Street, Brooklyn, NY, NY

1998
» Katonah Museum of Art, "Art as Spectacle", Katonah, NY, NY

1997
» Pseudo Productions, 600 Broadway, NY, NY

1996
» The Students of Professor Charles Eldred. A Memorial Alumni Exhibition, Binghamton, NY
» MBM Gallery, 580 Broadway, NY, NY