“There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“Like a word on a page that you’ve printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you’ve lost something, even if you’re not sure what it is.”  – Sarah Dessen

We are all human; we are intimately familiar with the most basic features of being human.  And yet, I am sure many of you have stared at yourselves in a mirror to the point of losing hold of your own image; you have been taken aback by how you become a stranger to yourself.  My work explores the shifting nature of time, place, concept, reality, and paint.  All of these notions rely heavily on the stability of our own perception of them – what if the perception keeps fracturing?  

I paint in a way that reflects my interest in the way the brain works, and the way I perceive the walk through life.  I explore thin layers, frenetic and searching brushwork, pentimenti (traces of previous work; evidence that the artist changed his/her mind), accident, and anomaly.   Francis Bacon writes,  “In my case all painting… is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.”   

For this particular body of work, my interest in Chance has taken center stage.  I used random technological glitches to interfere in my initial stages, and have thus had to construct a more reactionary way of working to known and obvious source images – a way that removes me another step from familiarity and control – trying to recreate the sensation of jaimas vu.