Artist Statement

Hubris is an ongoing body of work in which I am looking at Baroque and Renaissance pairings of Christian and Classical Greek tales. The interest originated from Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus. In this painting, the Roman god is represented as an ill figure: a human figure. This led me to question how the representation of gods in art allude to the wants of artists to elevate or centralize the human experience.

To complete this body of work, I have returned to studio portraiture. Recounting the poses and lighting used in these referenced paintings, I am photographing individuals in the conventions of Greek gods and/or Christian figures/icons. These portraits are created by medium and large format photography, both monochromatic and colored images. Again, these processes act as a means of slowing down the process and closely posing the models as needed. Each grouping of photos is represented as either triptychs or diptychs.

In creating this body of work, my goal is to analyze what happens when we depict humans as gods: is this an elevation of the human experience or is this an attempt to humanize the divine figure? For many reasons, I find the idea frightening, ironic, and hypocritical that people don’t understand it is unorthodox to attribute these human qualities to representations of gods and religious icons. However, I also find hope in it because it is the idea that people are searching for something divine and mystical within the human experience.