My primary interest as an artist may not be immediately apparent in my new work. That interest manifests in the existential tension in our anticipation of the future. Growing up in the 70's, the future was split between a magical world of flying cars and unfettered abundance, on one side, and a horrific world of nuclear war and post-apocalyptic scarcity on the other. Technology was at the root of both projections. The same techne that created the atomic bomb and held the world in a tenuous peace based on mutually assured destruction, was also supposed to save us from that untenable state. As a child, the future was a fantastic specter, one of both fear and wonder. As an artist, I am interested in capturing the tension between utopian and dystopian futures.

From a less dramatic and more humanistic perspective there is also a very interesting middle ground where the perception of utopia and dystopia overlap. In works of speculative science fiction like Brave New World we are presented with a future that holds an uneasy blend of elements from both domains. The world has always been polarized along ideologies based on fear of or hope for the future. There is a conservative impulse to retreat to the known and craft a future out of the best of the past. Countering this is a futurist impulse to sever the link between present and past and rebuild the future anew with the past serving only as a warning. One is doomed to sterility the other is doomed to collapse under the weight of it's perpetual renewal. The reality we all find ourselves in is as an ocean where we are cast about by the ebb and flow of these competing ideologies. At times they harmoniously coexist and we sail along on calm seas and at other times they are at loggerheads and the seas are in tumult.

The bulk of my current work is based on a cache of old photographs I inherited from an aunt and uncle who recently passed within a year of one another. The ones I find most interesting are from a childhood that I only remember through pictures. Painting these tableaux cast me back in time which is at once nostalgic but also allows me to step into the scene and contemplate my present from that remove. As a spectator in my own past the temporal tension is allowed to take form. Having stepped back in time, how does this future I've carried back with me measure up with the projections of my youth?

Ultimately, whether or not any of that translates into the work itself is unclear to me and feels besides the point as long as this cache of photos holds my interest. While my pallet of colors is muted to reflect the time worn feel of these old photographs, there is also a plastic vibrancy in acrylic paints that comes through and seems to modernize these frozen moments from my past. For now it is simply a box full of memories that aren't quite mine that allow me to meditate on the present I find myself in and, like some kind of time-traveling fortune teller from the past, recast the present into a magical future.