”Beneath any given blended or mixed form there might be two distinct ways of understanding the world, one in which such mergings and
minglings made sense, and one in which they did not.”
Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque (book title)
The title of the exhibition, Mergings and Minglings, stems from the above quote by Geoffrey Harpham, an expert in the field of the history of the grotesque. This quote states that all forms of the known world are seen in two distinct ways, one that is rooted in history where hybrid forms are a part of every day life, the other from the modern sense where hybrids remain on the outer edges of society.
This series of work explores themes associated with the grotesque through distortion, transformation, dark humor, absurdity, contrasting color palettes, and the play between positive and negative space and beauty and ugliness. I specifically abstract representational forms through repetition, symmetry, and change in orientation, ultimately transforming the shapes from their original context. Similar to the Rorschach test and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifttheory, the shapes are interchangeable, shifting between two or more forms, forever in a state of flux. Oftentimes, the imagery is overtly apparent, resembling certain icons found in popular culture and nature, while other times they are more concealed.
