On view in the William R. Jenkins Architecture & Art Library until November 2017. The artist, Isaac Farley, is now in the third year of an MFA program in painting.
My work is a form of storytelling. I want to tell stories of the lives of everyday people, like my family that is made up of people who were and are workers, either on ranches or in factories, and their desires, struggles, their triumphs, and tribulations. Stories are rooted in oral traditions and cave paintings and are the basis of human history. When I try to tell a story without words, I think in images. These images are influenced by movies, photography, and other art, and are most readily translated onto a two dimensional surface.
Often the work deals with America. Not so much what America is or what it was, but the ideal, and myth of America. America, the land of equal opportunity, where the truth is spoken, justice is fair and even, and where people live as they choose instead of what others impose on them.
Duality appears often in my work as innate and inborn opposing or balancing forces. People are simultaneously advanced and primitive, capable of great acts of kindness and cruelty, with the ability to create both great art and terrible destruction.
Leave a Reply