Lately, I have been focusing on the plethora of marks, signs,
symbols, and patterns that structure our daily experience. I
approach painting using a variety of subjects as infrastructural
components. Employing a cut-and-paste methodology, I assemble
images that reveal the process of their creation. Juxtaposing
material and illusory factors, I call attention to the amorphous
rift between representation and reality. My pieces are informed
by the mundane components of both our shared and private
day-to-day experiences. I make these pieces with the aspiration
My paintings set the stage for addictive personalities and puts
them under a spotlight. Often pulling from past work environments
(typically bars) I explore an ongoing theme of nightlife, while
adding snippets of dreams, superstition, and fantasy. What does
superstition look like? A seedy underbelly, sometimes exposed
in plain sight and at other times peeking through the shadows.
Through the haze of debauchery lurks a sinister psychological
frisson in which an altered state of consciousness subverts reality
and appearances become deceptive.
When making a painting, I employ only what I deem necessary.
Due to this economy of material, the canvas, for example, has
to do more than simply act as a surface to put an image on; it
has to contribute to the image itself. To get the most out of these
materials, I use them in a way that emphasizes what they are. If
I am using paint, I want it to feel like paint. If I am using canvas, I
want it to feel like canvas.
Liminality is soft. It is malleable, compliant, acquiescent, and
supple. At its worst, it is impressionable, submissive, gullible, and
feeble. At its best, it yields empathy and patience. I find strength
in liminality—in vulnerability.
I think of my paintings as misfits—blemished characters that
are either coming into being or left comically incomplete. I try to
present the viewer with specific situations and relationships that
playfully question the abstract world we live in. I am engrossed in
the peculiar and the imperfect.
My work explores the relationship between physical spaces
and the objects we fill them with. Often focusing on typical
domestic decor and household ornaments, the work makes these
inherently empty objects into simplified symbols that can then be
rearranged and compressed to carry a formal sensibility.
Currently, my work has concerned the idea of the painting as
ornament, with the stock subjects of landscape, still life, and
portraiture becoming knickknacks. I distill and consolidate these
ideas, using a generic design vernacular to highlight both the
My recent series Metallic Leaf Garden explores the way individuals’
minds reshape their physical environment. Contemporary
psychological theory allows that our consciousness, emotions,
and subconscious can be akin to the “paint” that consistently
colors our reality. My investigation incorporates a variety of
individual psychological realms, depicting them in fictionalized
surroundings that confuse the relationship between perception
and reality. I utilize a mixture of expressionist/abstract
aesthetics in a subtle, theatrical way to construct the characters’
I use the structures of role-play gaming and religious ritual to
create allegorical drawings. Leveling up, isometric perspective,
character creation, quest items, mythical beasts, and battles
are used to mirror real-life scenarios where the individual butts
up against institutional power structures. I contrast the reward
system in gaming that is finely tuned to providing pleasure to the
reward system of global capitalism that can at times feel arbitrary
and cruel. My drawings are power simulations where I rule over
a white rectangle.