I seek to express a sublime truth through trash, low technologies, and other base materials. While creating and installing I try to practice faithful surrender to the laws of chance, gravity, and materiality. I record my love affair with the sky through photographs, paintings, poems, and gigantic found fabric collage-like sculptures that droop from and cover ceilings. After years of living with depression, I have absurd and prescient comfort with death. This shows itself in my interest in dark topics entered playfully. Always interested in darkness and night; sleeping and waking and the dreaming in between is a consummate interest of mine. My paintings and photographs are always not quite solid, shifting in dim lighting, ghost forms appearing, and shadows obscuring. I am interested materially and conceptually in seams. The seams of clothing, quilts, houses, horizon, family, friendship, reality. I seek to isolate the location and gaps of seams - do we peak through to brilliant ecstasy or churning madness? What if we can’t recognize the difference?
I use symbols to reference a common vocabulary found in dreams, children’s books, and universal signage. Keys, Doors, Windows, Cats, Ladders, Flowers, Houses, Clocks, Dice. Recognizable symbols can be referenced and distorted to quickly convey a narrative. I use these forms in my paintings, and I create large versions of these symbols in sculpture. Recreating often purely representative, unusable versions of these objects, I return them back to the realm of ideas, back to the subconscious, and death.
I am deeply inspired by children’s books and poetry and use my own drawing and poetry to attempt to maintain a presence. I compose my color palettes through observation and study of trash, sorting through the gorgeous items that have failed us in some way. I know what it’s like to be thrown out, I pick them up and let them know that what has failed is also free.
Artists they talk to include; Ree Morton, Ursula K Le Guin, Casey Plett, Phylida Barlow, Octavia Butler, Hilma Af Klint, Yvonne Rainer, Lydia Davis, NK Jemisin, Samuel Delany, M. Tellez, Nicole Claveloux, T. Fleishman, Sheila Heti, H.D., Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Shirley Jackson.