Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
I remember staring endlessly at the books on my parents' shelves, trying to decode the adult world through their covers before I could understand their contents. Jackie Oh!, Wifey, Scruples, The Bitch, The Thorn Birds, Dreams Die First. The 70's covers were lurid, glamorous, and completely illegible to me. I understood only that they were about something I wasn't supposed to know yet.
This series isolates fragments of those typefaces, cropped and enlarged until the letters become almost abstract—retaining their emotional charge while losing their legibility. Paired as diptychs, they function like open books or facing pages. A jacket is also a costume. A cover. The thing that presents itself to the world while concealing what's inside. Jackie O is the series' secret patron saint—her name hiding inside the title, her presence haunting that shelf. These works are about the gap between a surface and what it advertises, between the child looking out and the adult world looking back.
Gaston Bachelard wrote about childhood as a permanent mode of perception, where certain objects carry a quality of the not-yet-understood that never fully resolves. These book covers hold that quality for me. Making them into paintings is my way of getting inside them—not to explain what they meant, but to finally inhabit what secrets they seemed to hold.