What prayer done

I was raised on the fire and brimstone preaching and teachings of the Southern Baptist Church. The fear of God runs deep in my family. Surrounded by the monoliths and mausoleums of a dying tobacco farming industry in rural Kentucky, my childhood was fraught with lessons in rust and flame. In the Book of Revelations, it says: there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away, but I do not contemplate this New Jerusalem. It is the residue.

My work, through printmaking and drawing, offers a record of warped pastoral landscapes, snapshots of decay, and precarious situations that examine the still-dissolving rose-colored vignette that shrouds the American South. Layering together sequences of disjunctive photographic references, the work surveys instances of nefarious nature, where religious extremism and exasperated cultures highlight the fragility and degradation of man. In this murky and incoherent setting I string together a constellation of filmic associations, that serve as speculative documents, attempting to make sense of their surroundings. At the intersections of the frivolous and the tragic, these non-linear narratives congeal, concerning themselves with delusion, documentation, and revelation.