Life In Stilled

The images in this series are largely inspired by the 17th century still life paintings of Jean Baptiste Chardin. They are meant to hover between past and present by straddling the line between photography and painting.  I construct sets that mimic the paintings of Chardin from canvas and plaster, and arrange combinations of found, fabricated, and/or painted objects in order both replicate and reimagine Chardin’s work. By printing on slightly textured semi-luster fine art paper, the detail of the painted canvas and plaster used to make the sets melds with the texture of the paper, creating a depth and tactile quality that blurs the visual line between painted and printed image. In some images, the line is so convincingly blurred that viewers get within inches of the surface and barely touch it trying to discern if it is paint or print. Through the art of illusion these digital produced prints take on the same type of haptic qualities that have drawn me to alternative processes. Shown as large-scale prints and floated in frames without glass, these works are intended to evoke both the physical and the historical weight of a painting. They bring past and present together in the same frame, speak directly to our physical existence, and to our indisputable mortality. However, in traditional still life fashion, they also speak to the idea that the only thing we can possibly do to rail against this fate is to embrace life in its entirety and move towards the future.