I approach collage through the prism of paranoid associations. Drawing on logics of conspiracy and apophenia (the perception of meaningful connections and patterns in random events), I unify seemingly disparate elements. These connections speak to the contemporary desire to cast off illusion and reveal hidden realities; to the suspicion that everything happens for a reason; to the impulses of disbelief in official narratives and credulous belief in the heterodox. This strategy emerges from the epistemic crisis at the intersection of an unstable economic order and the proliferation of information technologies. The result is a body of work gripped by both apophenic madness and a vertiginous incredulity.
I derive collage material from rabbit hole internet searches into conspiratorial subjects. Using fragments of digital images I construct photomontages in dialogue with the history of abstraction. These fragments are often enlarged to the point of pixelation, reflecting the insatiable scrutiny of modern skepticism. In this sense, the work is about illegibility as a form of abstraction that arises from the occult unknown. The construction of compositions mirrors both the opacity of the conspirator’s master plans and the transparency of the conspiracist’s wall of evidence. My obsessively collaged surfaces operate as an allegory of revelation and suppression, asking viewers to make sense of images that are about the ways we struggle to decipher our world. On the surface, the work is decorative and anodyne, but this innocuousness belies the secret realities, patterns, plots, psyops, false flags, and mystic truths hidden below.
