I Make Oil Paintings That Look Like Cult Films

My work focuses on realism painting. I use dramatic colors and thin glazes to render realistic figures, objects, and spaces that evoke a sense of the sinister. In these works, I examine horror and cult film to create imageries of violence, danger, and tension. These paintings feature characters at uncertain moments, situated in disrupted narratives with montages of unrelated still images. By referencing the format of film stills and Roland Barthes’ Hermeneutic Code, I source from photographs of sites and models, which I manipulate digitally to build “sets” to paint from. They often reference color palettes, compositions, and lightings of films by David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Dario Argento. I also look to Mathew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle to study the structuring of logic and narratives. My work distorts and removes narrative imageries from their contexts in order to reveal the uncanniness of moments and to create suspense. They draw associations to each other and fabricate a fictional theme around anxiety, fate, and mythology.

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