The Showstopper is a continuation on some of my paintings and thoughts about spectacle and performance, and the lengths to which a person will go for the sake of an audience and their expectations. I think a lot about the artifice in my work, so the tradition of the magic act is being referenced here, when magicians would saw their assistants in half then reassemble them but there was an obvious gimmick, and I wanted to create a scene where the performer is enacting the “trick” on himself but with no gimmick as a fail safe, gleefully(or performatively gleefuly) sawing away at himself in an attempt to please the viewers.

Also this is one of the vignettes pulled from my Large scale piece I showed last year at Basel, in which there’s a magic show happening at a casino and one of the figures is sawing another in half. I do that a lot but usually the works are in the same show.