At the core of my work is an investigation of power structures that influence the evolution of lifestyles embodying stability, leisure, abundance, and affluence. I’m interested in the infinite ways power structures appear in daily life and the impact they have on consumer trends of the Global North middle-class.

 

Current Research Concerns (June 2024)

My current body of work draws on media sources from the early 2000s to today. I search for patterns in trends and the creation of iconography, from interior design to fashion cycles, from where we vacation to where we choose live and work. I’m interested in the transformation objects and places undergo from regular physical and psychological weathering, such as the overuse of an Hermès Kelly bag, to the affective shift of objects and places throughout the different stages of their life-cycles. For example, the dramatic cognitive shift that occurs with the release of the latest iPhone, to the purchasing and desensitisation of it through consistent exposure over a long period of time, revealing its mechanical flaws and thus emerges a dissolution of social status just in time for the next version’s release. This transformation reveals itself not only in commodified consumer goods, but as well in tourism, lifestyles, workplaces and art.

 

I am currently using painting as a vessel to contemplate on the various value systems and metaphorical supply chains of Westernised social status. Painting’s historical relationship to elitism, religion and romantic notions of reality as well as its influence on counterculture, protest and dissemination of power in the 20th century inform how I approach the subjects in my work today. I use painting as a regenerative analog response to disseminate mass-produced media such as tabloid images from the early 2000s, to hyper-minimalist architecture made popular and recognizable through influencers and celebrities. In doing this, I create adaptive narratives that reflect on the commodification of self-expression and the evolution of global Westernised culture.