Open gallery
“I know we did the legal, moral, and ethical thing that night. It’s sad how the good guys are demonized, and criminals are canonized…” A quote from Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, sent in an email to the Louisville Metro Police regarding the murder of Breonna Taylor back in March during their botched drug raid, reveals the modern dogmatic culture of policing and police brutality in the United States. I explore this equally terrifying and interesting topic through satire in my portrait series, Grotesque. My subjects, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, Detective Myles Cosgrove, former Detective Brett Hankison, and former Sheriff Robert Chody are painted based on their official photographs and police headshots and then distorted. Their features are shrunk, stretched, enlarged, and disfigured to create an absurd reflection of the individuals based on actions rather than their position of power. They are painted with a murky combination of pinks and greens to further separate them from reality and influence the viewers’ perceptions of the characters.