Can You Help Me Find The Remote? (2019)

Let Me Be Your Holly, (2019). Oil on canvas. 48 x 60 x 2 in.

In the body of work, Can You Help Me Find The Remote? (2019), I create compositions that contrast heteronormative imagery with homoerotic imagery through the continual reference of various romantic films from the history of cinema. In this project, I focus on films that revel in the campy and overtly sappy American idealizations of what love is historically defined as. Due to these films as pop-culture symbols, I acknowledge their original format by painting the effect of a translucent film layer over an eerie landscape with a limited color palette. The film layer is formally inspired by “screen caps”, popularized by social media sites such as Tumblr and Twitter. Screen caps traditionally feature frames of a scene with stylized closed captioning, which informs the viewer of the spoken dialogue. Through painting these various compositions, I disrupt the historic tradition of landscape painting by creating scenes that simultaneously blur and heighten the differences between heterosexual and homosexual narratives. When a straight narrative is presented with a gay narrative, I investigate the inherent value determinations that arise from having one narrative superimposed over another. By generating environments from multiple sources, I present a body of work that asks the viewer to assess which narrative deserves the most importance.