Far from Tennessee, after art school, I feel like a diplomat: translating back and forth from my oddball Southern family to the academic art world. (While Piet Mondrian and Billy Graham have both talked about God, for example, their languages are so wildly different that each might regard the other as a complete idiot.) Art is undeniably a language, as similar to folklore as to academic jargon, used just like the Bible—justifying most anything, lost in translation, and quoted out of context by museums, collectors, intellectuals, and skeptics. 

With translation in mind, I decided to re-examine portraiture. The genre has always been about a sort of love triangle between the viewer, artist, and subject. In order to twist these roles so that the viewer and I are more aware of them (and out of sheer curiosity) I chose three close friends—Mark, Valerie, and Alice, all of whom actually exist and do not know each other—and I worked in character as each of them. I imagined that they went to The Corcoran College of Art + Design together, then I built bodies of work for each “artist."  The work has evolved over time, complete with sketchbooks, letters, artistic failures and successes, and plausible relationships between the characters. Since none of the three actual friends are fine artists I did not mimic, but rather invented their artistic style based on their characteristics, their personal aesthetics, and the character traits of artists I've known and studied who remind me of them. Finally, I traveled to Georgia and Kentucky to interview the actual Alice, Valerie and Mark on camera, all of us lucidly engrossed by the hazy line between reality and fiction. My three friends spoke of spectacularly honest and revealing experiences, but also toyed with the idea of playing Themselves, the Artists.

As I worked I wondered, how well can one person know another, beyond the ways people present themselves? It turns out I didn’t know them nearly as well as I had thought, and after the guessing game of creating their work, the candid interviews were profoundly enlightening and touching.

I'm also interested in the idea that artwork is completely stuck within its own environment of discussion by critics, of the artist’s past work and reputation, of the culture in which that work is made, and of predominant ideas at the time. No longer justified only by physical presence in museums—thanks to modern media and information—once someone is known virtually by The Art World as an Artist, their behavior and byproducts are considered to be Art. With this project, I get to create my own discursive site for each artist, an easily faked virtual history: invented institutions, artistic precedent, criticism, and discussion. Inventing and parodying these elements produces a hearty institutional critique, both playful and pejorative.

Finally, I hope that an overall spirit of respect, compassion, and humor opens this work to interested people both inside and outside of The Art World.