ABSTRACT I create portraits and self-portraits that explore the dualities of the western human condition, namely the deviant and the ideal, the refined and the unrefined, and the perfect and the flawed. Drawing on personal experiences with people considered outsiders or social deviants, I construct figures that embody the conflicting ideas inherent in these dualities. I explore these conflicts in drawings that are constructed with marks and shapes that are both basic and refined, and in photographs that use analytic documentation to describe social turmoil. I reference artists both contemporary and historical, such as Egon Schiele, Robert Longo, Kathe Kollwitz, Shepard Fairey and Eadweard Muybridge, and use a process that is both intellectual and intuitive in order to create work that is multivalent in nature with a foundation in the visual language of figurative art. My work becomes an open invitation for viewers to explore the tensions and conflicts that make up the contemporary human condition through the frozen actions of a figure
