So, as you might know, I had an opening last night..

Pictures here. They reprinted that blog in the print edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and they put the picture of the chandelier on the front page of the arts section, so when we got up on Friday morning my mom was all “go look at the paper” and I started freaking out even though I had a hunch/hope that they would do that.

But yeah here’s the statement I gave them for the wall.

The Pursuit of Happiness

“I’m on the pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold.” (Kid Cudi)

The quest for utopia is the basis of progression. As human beings in general, we are always after the next thing that is going to make us a better, more complete person. In modern society, a lot of the work is done by objects – a new smart phone packed with amazing applications is probably the example of the moment.

Most of my work begins with a basis in ornament and decoration, particularly that of the Gilded Age that occurred just before the turn of the 20th century. For me, this era instantly references a certain kind of lifestyle – that of sprawling mansions and grand parties, and the first instances of obscene amounts of wealth (and the celebrity that followed because of it) that this country had ever experienced. In our own disposable time, where mass media moves at the same speed as our attention span for the fate of the plastic rings on our six-pack, the authentic experience of that high life becomes less and less accessible, yet the desire for personal wealth on that type of scale is the backbone of contemporary popular culture, in which I am firmly entrenched. I feel that there are many parallels to be drawn between the obsession for collecting and displaying objects that stems from this period and the views our culture currently has about mass consumption and the production of goods and objects.

When conceiving this piece, I was thinking about the existence of the somewhat flexible systems in our daily lives that keep us all in check – stereotypes, social constructs, et cetera. This led me to think about the first incarnation of the American suburb directly after the Second World War, the birthplace of the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”, and what sort of space that was initially created to be and do versus how we view the same space now. It was supposed to be a haven and a thank you gift of sorts for the returning G.I.s and their new families, but in the 60 years that followed, the effects of this so-called utopia have influenced almost everything we do as a society, in a lot of ways not for better. In a way, for me, the suburbs of that time period (and the newer developments of the New Urbanist manifesto of recent years) are a perfect representation of everything I want to explore in my work – multiple levels of façade and simulacra, the never-ending quest for utopia and its subsequent failure on an epic scale, pattern and repetition, as well as it being the cradle for everything that I hold dear in contemporary popular culture.

PS I should probably say that there was a girl at the opening who got the Jersey Shore thing without anyone saying anything. I heard her say it and turned around from the conversation I was in all like “YES!!! You got it!!” That made my night.