Dressing up the natural realm of everyday life brings me pleasure. Like cropping the flap of a dog’s ear, I tailor aspects of reality to enhance or conceal true circumstances. With this comes a sense of control that I carry as I navigate daily living. But the authority of choice is never without the leaking of the subconscious. I may give my hand permission to roam a drawing surface freely, without intention, but it will never perform marks without learned habits. However, this contradiction of naturalness and construction provides an exciting place to live.

My work begins as an experiment with the possibilities of collage on a variety of surfaces or backgrounds. From building a believable domestic interior on flat areas of color and pattern to transforming these patterns into geometric landscapes, the collaged elements create conceptual spaces and immediate psychological realities. Essential to the work is the scale relationship between the collaged and the painted elements; this relationship allows the work to confront ideas of image versus reality, depth, and depthlessness.

My paintings portray compressed and bustling spaces and are inspired by anything—from films and books to travel and memories. I develop the paintings using a compilation of unrelated images taken from photographs that are either shot on location or found through Internet research. As part of this process, I make digital sketches of the composition, using Photoshop to answer some of my initial questions concerning space and color.

As an artist, I find it my duty to candidly critique the culture I’m living in and form part of. My work is generated in that way, and it has become a tapestry of my life that transcribes and reconstructs the societal idée fixe of the black body in popular culture, while also undermining the notions of gender normativity within black subjectivity.

People are mirrors of their environments, interacting with the past, present, and ideas of the future, right? What I mean is, where, when, and how mainly define us, passing through us. Therefore, I confound the space and subjects in my work; the characters are not only placed inside a setup, they are the stage themselves. These assemblage-people end up being a joke emerging out of simplified symbols: tits = feminist; cigarette = romantic painter; tongue = rejection, and so on. Sometimes failing at what they’re attempting, as artifacts of lost cultures

I’m currently engaged in the creation of two interrelated bodies of work: Cosmic Debris and Wavelength(s). Both explore, in different ways and through differing media, the vastness of the universe, the transience of the individual, and the life force that connects all things. Aesthetically and thematically, neon is the grammar that links together these two bodies of work. The narrative juxtaposes the impermanence of a single life and the infinite nature of life itself, a dual state of being that is both unsettling and comforting. These short phrases rendered in

I experiment with the medium of painting—reconstructing the distinct roles that paint, raw canvas, and rectilinear support play in art-making. The paintings are concrete and abstract. I work in collaboration with the material, asking it to have a voice in the outcome—to reveal itself. I create circumstances that allow the materials to resist, or comply with, various manipulations. There is a consistent tone of self-referentiality, which allows the work to sidestep heavy intention and preference the cycle of action/ observation/discovery that happens in the studio.

I am primarily concerned with formal and material issues. While my works are restrained and reductive in composition, value, and color use, the additive and accumulative nature of my process and the visible evidence of facture presents them as possible carriers of meaning. Architectural references are suggested via structure, geometry, shape, texture, and the forms themselves; a builder’s logic is always employed. My work does not comment, narrate, or declare, and with the materials I select, from varied origins, the works perhaps exist simply as discrete artifacts of my involvement.

My paintings feature humorous landscapes where representation is fetishized. Using a maximalist approach in paintings that slip between modes of representation, I address the process of responding to the spatial illusions of painting, materiality, and imagery. My work features warped spaces where figure and ground merge. Drawn lines help demarcate the slippage between what is and what might be, calling attention to the constructed setlike spaces. Using clichés as props, the work points to a larger cultural obsession with the idealization of the everyday and its link to the “feminine.”

My paintings feature backgrounds of pieced-together drawings of imagery taken from my everyday life layered on top of one another, sketchbook-style, with colorful hard-edged lines painted on top. Through multiple forms of application, the paintings jump back and forth between references to traditional painting and mindless doodles. This process mimics the fluidity of browsing the Internet, moving from thoughtful political articles with global ramifications to humorous GIFs and skate videos. I am interested in how protocols of digital processes play out, and blend with an