projects

It's Complicated

Like the girlish collages of a scrap-booking fan, the portraits have been “glamorized” with glitter, flocking and rhinestones, these tawdry and often tragic icons sanctified by loving and devoted embellishment with commonly available home-craft materials. Graphically painted in a style that recalls comic book illustration and 80’s poster art, each of the subjects is surrounded by motifs, colors, and patterns that relate to specific parts of their biographies. The green and white stripes in the painting of Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo recall Escobar’s favorite soccer team, and the camouflage in the paintings of Clara Rojas and Rodrigo Echeverry correspond to the uniforms worn by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The crown and the Sinaloan sombrero, the formal accoutrements of a forlorn beauty queen and her narco boyfriend, are joined by another set of accessories – the familiar placard and height-marking bars of the mug shot.

All together, I’m interested in how these the figures play with our notions of love, the folk hero, and fandom, by existing not only on the other side of the screen or border, but are literally and metaphorically projected into our homes through all our varied media and carried with us in our myths and fantasies.

Lovers and War ( Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo)

A suite of paintings on narco love and geo-political intrigue. Click Aqui.

Paintings
In Hipsters, Soccer Fans, and Wanna-Be's, I'm interested in exploring "Style" and it's potential for the creation of a transgressive identity. The idea of how "Beauty" is articulated in the streets and the creative mix or mash-up of styles, histories, class, and racial communities that emerges from not only the urban streets, of say downtown Los Angeles or Hollywood, but the suburbs of the city, like Hacienda Heights, Whittier, or Alhambra, where boredom and safety breed creative solutions to the way we can stand out, personalize, and rebel. This mash-up is represented through the mixing of patterns, colors, cheap textures (flocking and glitter) with hard-edge painting. The hard-edge stripes and patterns recall the history of painting and is objective, but can also be found on the street within street signs, building paint surfaces, and the silk-screened patterns of trendy skateboard and hip-hop fashion companies. I'm interested in the place wear skinny jeans and shaggy hair meets shaved heads and soccer jerseys meets preppy polo shirts and dock shoes go punk rock. The safety pin in my ear is sign for those who can read it. Or as in the words of Robert Molina, my neighbor from the sixth grade, "Caroline! Decide what you want to be; A preppy, a chola, a new waver, or a school girl." I want to be all of those, I guess.

Joseph, 2009: mixed media on canvas (48" x 60")