Artist Statement 

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For years I’ve been interested in expanding the purpose and reach of figurative drawing and painting, and exploring a broader vision of their relation to the world at large.

My figures and their positionings evolve out of in-depth research on a range of ideas, including species being and kindred ties across species, what transformations, transmogrifications and exchanges occur when the Other is not assumed to be only human, and cross cultural mythologies. I examine the Other specifically through queer, plant, and animal imagery—usually combined with flavors of the uncanny (uncomfortably strange yet familiar) and the haunted, where haunting represents socio-cultural figures or forms wronged and left in an unresolved or dissolute state. My work uses “creaturely” bodies, spacial dislocation, humor, and vividness of affect to express ethical urgency and soulfulness in a realm of political agitation and contingency. Odd, tender, morphing, and dislocated sexualities also appear in this mix.

Other project-based strategies bring my images to life by letting them roam through different structural contexts, ranging from installations to displaced or reconfigured paintings to site-specific figurative works in urban environments, and floating museums. 

There are always the questions, posed through these hyper fantastical hybridities of rendering, titling, and placement: “What IF?” and “How can things that seem normal and fixed actually be contingent and otherwise?”

 

“Visibility is a complex system of permission and prohibition, of presence and absence, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness.” –Laura Kipnis