I apply pressure to images and language to crack them open, make them tactile, and dilate them into an expanded space. Images and words are my starting points for painted, faceted sculptures, in which I complicate and play with an internal/ external push-and-pull. My work speaks to many subjects— politics and power, the body’s visceral reaction to its environment, conversations between the haptic and the retinal—but there is a consistency in my examination of forces in opposition, and a need to open up and aerate an idea. My pieces incorporate visual puns:

I work within the realm of abstraction, exposing the visually unknown through a process of superimposing layers of paint and other materials on a substrate. I am interested in incorporating materials and processes from traditional painting practices along with commercial and industrial applications. I continuously build on systematic modes of production while also trying to disrupt and counteract my personal desires to create a harmonious composition. I am fascinated with creating and referencing contemporary visual languages, subsuming,

I am interested in portraying primitive human emotions. Emotions such anxiety, anger, compulsion, sex, fear, confusion, self-doubt, lust, and existential questioning. My intention is for the viewer to experience a visceral reaction to the work. Tension in my work is important as I create a familiar/comfortable space that is also unsettling and alien for the viewer. The familiar/ comfortable elements can be interpreted through the objects in the paintings referencing the home, while the surface treatments and manipulations of these elements can give an unknown feeling.

My practice combines minimal pencil drawings of simplified, whimsical forms with large-scale canvases and idiosyncratic neon sculpture. I start by bending and shaping the neon tubes that will later inform the graphite images. The paintings, then, play with an understanding of “light” in representational painting by the literal presence of a light-emitting element. The “light” in the paintings operates, at once, as representational form (tree, cloud, goldfish, flower), line, color, light source, and as a commentary on the relationship among all four. In the Duchampian tradition, I

I investigate anxieties of the female experience as it relates to aging, vanity, shame, restraint, and pleasure, in order to confront the social conditioning that perpetuates the repression of feminine desire, and prioritizes and encourages male pleasure. Through puppetry, drawing, and printmaking, I bridge the genres of performance and visual art to consider how female desire is inhibited, enacted, sustained, and diminished between the spectrum of adolescence and end of life.

Emotional identities and intimacies fascinate me. Although these conditions cannot be clearly defined, I enjoy the struggle of attempting to examine them or create new questions asking what we think we know about ourselves. My goal is to question these complicated qualities of closeness through painting, sewing, or drawing.

By critiquing both past and present histories of ecological atrocity, this series of paintings subvert dominant global narratives while envisioning new ones. Through an exploration of symbiotic relationships, the figures in my work have stakes and agency in their environments. Drawing on parallels within form, color, and space allows me to investigate the potential for what I consider metamorphic organic poetry.

We all have a desire to live on after we have gone. The snapshot aids this ambition and allows for reflection on our lives, the decisions we made, and how we evolved (or not) since the shutter was released. I often work with my family’s film photographs because they are a physical reminder of when they were made and how they were shared. In the past, sharing a photo album was an intimate and revealing act, whereas showing artwork is always a public one, and making these paintings is both. I began inserting my adult self into some paintings to depict a yearning

My recent work combines hand-formed figurative elements with bold, decorative backgrounds to depict queer spaces defined by lust, friendship, and tragedy. Using the symbolic, time-honored imagery of the flower and the butterfly as stand-ins, my paintings represent the bodily presence of the individual or the playful mise-en-scène of group interaction. Overlapping surfaces and dizzying patterns create energetic compositions, while paper pulp gives the work the feel of hand-molded intimacy.

Wherever one goes or comes from, home remains a place to have and to work toward. Feelings of comfort and belonging hold us captive, and these senses can occur in a specific place or simply the physical walls of a house. Ritual becomes the keeper of boundaries within the home. This storytelling comes from an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from digging through the past of personal monuments and archived histories. Gathering personal symbols authenticates something forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It allows