In the sweltering Summer of 2009 I moved into a tiny apartment in Los Angeles on the edge of Little Armenia in East Hollywood. I had spent the previous year in one of the darkest moments of my life as my entrance to LA was a complete albatross landing. Desperately seeking recovery, I moved what little possessions I had into this place, including two massive canvases that I found in a dumpster outside the Disney Consumer Products building. In what I can only remember as months of shaking and sweating, I slowly but surely regained my sense of self through retraining my hands to paint. I brewed tons of coffee, and like a hermit, spent most of my time indoors focusing on these large canvases to get me through the day.
The pieces that I worked on concentrated on the idea of tangible deities. Idolatry in religion and celebrity culture take parallel psychological nature in the fact that there is an element of worshipping something thats being broadcasted. Granted, this concept is no stranger in the artworld, clearly because pop art is art on POPular culture, but I still wanted to do this. I wanted to focus on painting icons, because I needed to understand something greater than myself, and in our socially constructed media bred world, the bigger the broadcast, was a direction closer to God. It makes sense to me, why I did this. Growing up Catholic, I was brought to believe that there were humans who were direct microphones to God’s answering machine. This type of education socially constructed me to believe that musicians and artists who were on TV had the same element of stardom that equalled a sort of god like quality. And even though that idealism has deteriorated as I grow older, I wanted to pay homage to it.
