Faris McReynolds

My work comes from the desire to find a balance between something that is staged and intuitive, original and reproduced, familiar and unexpected, digital and analog, comic and tragic. These are images where individual personality is paired with the anonymity of a crowd. They are like public memories, appropriated from images that were created for the purpose of telling a story, but once disconnected, tell a larger story about a self-congratulating American culture.

Isolated, re-contextualized, and transformed from digital source imagery into materially driven expressionist paintings, the work explores the grey area between a document and the imagination of a time and place. I'm drawn to moments that exist between genesis and resolve. Something so fleeting and anonymous it's impossible to see without the aid of technology. I paint from film stills I have taken with a camera to make the anxiety contained in less than a second last a lifetime. I have removed cause and effect from the image, and transitions and reactions hang in place to tell a new story rather than to continue an existing one.

The Beautful Mob consists of three parts: public (outdoor) performance, private (interior) performance, and unwanted attention. The crowds who are spectators, openly display their desire to be those who are watched. The sun-bathed bodies of desire writhe in into an anonymous mass, which in turn repels. The performers collapse, and lose themselves in moments of unending disconnection instead of triumph or glory. The lone woman in the back gazes askew and covers herself, the material rendering of her face mirroring the chaos in any of the other paintings in the show.

Faris McReynolds - February 2007, Los Angeles

Faris Mc Reynolds °1977,Dallas, Texas - Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Faris McReynolds
The beautiful mob