One of the first actions the President takes after being inaugurated is to hire an artist to paint an official state portrait. Historically, the central function of painting has been to represent power and power always strives to represent history as the path of necessity.

As part of a larger series of paintings that examine the problematic tradition of history painting, these works investigate the way images come to represent moments of the past. Rather than posit a unified sense of history based upon notions of progress and development, this series approaches the past as if it were, in the words of Michel Foucault, a “population of dispersed events.” These works appropriate elements of nostalgic kitsch, action-film stills and historical photographs in order to reveal the discontinuities in their systems of internal relations.

In The Great Communicator, rampant car crashes, monstrous alligators, squadrons of armed helicopters and mirrored explosions surround Ronald Reagan, the heroic cowboy president. Within the fantastical space of the painted surface, the line between fictionalized desire and historical record becomes entirely arbitrary. I am interested in the way this interpretive slippage calls us into being, defining our limits of self and shaping our memory.

Popular culture performs history as a series of clichéd inevitabilities. If we are to truly remember history as an image, it must be envisioned as a catastrophe. In Asking Not What You Can Do, translucent layers of antiquing glaze veil highly detailed painterly illusionism, signifying processes of decay and accumulation; simultaneously, decorative stencils, Victorian frames and elegant scrollwork convey the awkward process of memorializing trauma as an image. Public and private memory collapse into a messy zone of indistinctness and the logic of ornament in these paintings is purely excremental.

My work is about history and the ability to imagine alternative histories as sites of shared meaning. At the core of my work is a faith in the potential of an imagined community as a site of resistance. Ultimately, I want to remember history not as it was, but as it could have been.