These newest in-progress works have allowed a return to the human form, offering an infusion of visceral media and a new platform to investigate time and empathy. This grouping of new portraits are collections of people that are visually 'compressed' into one hybrid image, creating a new composite of their collective identity. The only caveat is that they consider themselves to be a 'family', as all definitions of family are open to interpretation regardless if they are nuclear, extended, joint, single-parent, reconstituted, childless, family by choice, LGBTQ or undefined.
In this fashion - time, age, race, gender and biological factors all collapse into one another regardless of the nature of the families relationships or perceived identities. In essence, these new portraits become visual aggregate data sets with their own unique qualities and identifiers, as all of the the subjects are superimposed directly upon one another.
To capture the complex network of relationships , gesture and emotion are allowed to run rampant throughout the images as deemed necessary through their dramatic posturing. Traditional modes of painting meet technology in these images as aspects of facial recognition, digital rasterization, camera obscura, chiaroscuro and sfumato are all employed in these heavily layered, cinematically framed paintings.
