"I wanted to be alone in quite an unusual, new way. The very opposite of what you are thinking: namely, without myself and, in fact, with an outsider present."
-Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
“Several years ago I was invited to visit a photo archive where a friend was working. The collection contained thousands, if not millions, of found and purchased snapshot photos from all over the world, cataloged by a main event or subject depicted: a red umbrella, or a birthday party, or a circus elephant, etc. Seeing these images cataloged in this way—MULTIPLE examples where you could imagine the photographer saying “hold still—this is gonna be great!”—had an effect on how I think of selfhood, how we craft it, and how we present it to others. And it cemented within me the sense that this endeavor is endearing and its product quite flimsy. We’re building with, more or less, the same raw materials.
My work comes from life: observed, overheard, life reconfigured/staged. It is primarily diaristic, though I turn up and down the saturation and tweak or swap out various figures and scenery in order to document what happened, but also how it should have happened or how it felt. My figures are closely cropped, resulting in a proximity that suggests intimacy while rendering the subject all but anonymous. This obfuscation of things quotidian, rendered through paint with a deliberately tender attention, can be welcoming and alienating, and that’s kind of the point. Painting, for me, is a sort of a contingency plan: if the message is lost (I often lose it myself), at least I have this object. A quiet record of care.
In any artistic endeavor, I am interested in the overall equation of identity or an event and breaking it down to its constituent parts. In this grouping, I document some of my stuff, my body, loved ones, dumb jokes to myself, the detritus of my life in order to continue to pick apart and catalogue this persona. I choose me as a subject because I’m always around, and because I suspect that whoever is looking at the work and/or reading this can’t be too different, ultimately. In this respect I’m picking you apart, too.”
Logan T. Sibrel
