Functional Affinites : Paintings was installed in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. The show was a total of eleven oil paintings, all of which were portraits of seating units. Through the application of paint and the implications of the center, straight-on composition, each seat became something much more than the original. The show deals first and foremost with the interaction between individuality and collectivity. In each portrait, I contain the personality and character of the chair and translate it to the audience through my editing process and my application of paint. The objects became unique emblems representative of a version of themselves and also part of a new collection based on their formal presentation simultaneously. Throughout Functional Affinities : Paintings there is a clash between the assertion of individual character and the assimilation into a mass, enhanced through the composition and breakdown of physical form into abstract mass. Each object's uniqueness is respected and discarded at the same time. The silhouette color and texture, the shifting background, the choice of the realistic proportions, the increase in size and stature each work to create distinct characters that exist in a specific world of portraiture, whose perameters are inclusive to the body of work. The relationship of the collective and individual portrait to the viewer is a shifting and tenuous one because of assertivness of the silhouette and the establishment of a larger than life scale for each object, diminishing the viewer in stature. The paint of the silhoutette and shifting background continually reasserts itself and changes the painting so that the viewer must once again find sure footing. As a whole, Functional Affinities : Paintings looks at the sensuality and impartiality of objects, the creation of a communal structure, and the forceful power of paint.