Rocky Horton was born in Arlington, Tennessee in 1973. He attended college at Harding University, in Searcy, Arkansas. After graduating in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Art, he lived and worked in Italy, first Milan then Naples, for approximately two years. He received an M.F.A. in Studio Art from West Virginia University in December of 2003. Since that time he has served as a Professor of Art at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.

In the most recent works, I have begun exploring the conceptual slippage inherent in art’s contact with contemporary culture. The work creates an opportunity for a very intricate conversation about religious and psychologically loaded images, their intersection with pop-culture, and the hope and failure of these images to provide transcendence. The work is both a critique of these kinds of images and visual art. Perhaps as a result of the de-mystification of the post-enlightenment world or the unwillingness/inability to understand the miraculous, the work attempts reclaim images as transcendent or magical and not just aestheticized objects. At the same time, they recognize the inability to reclaim or understand them as such. Overall, like art in contemporary society, the theme is hope and failure and hope again (with some absurdity thrown in for good measure).