I collect moments of revelation and visually give them away as a drawing or a painting. In sharing these revelations, I hope to motivate the viewer to reassess things typically taken for granted.

These works are an investigation of portraiture as a way of documenting and exploring my relationships with, and perceptions of, close friends and family. I am interested in the static nature and artifice of the posed portrait. By referencing early American folk paintings I seek to depict the tender awkwardness that those works exemplify. Both manufactured and factual, character traits are revealed through clothing, patterns, and props. Each accoutrement helps to suggest a particular time period for each portrait.

This recent series of work focuses on landscape in the postmodern world. The intention of these paintings is to unify the quiet aesthetics of traditional landscape with the visual onslaught beginning with the advent of modern technology. Each landscape is grounded with elements of structure and permanence while others fall away or become illusions. The rendering of the unbalanced into symmetry is an effort to comprehend the benefits and shortcomings of the way we understand the world in the age of information.

Through works on paper, I explore ideas of displacement, consumption, and the environments in which we live. By combining everyday experience, nostalgia, and urban visual cues, I create absurd constructions within my paintings to try and understand the complex interactions between people, spaces, and things. Recognizable imagery surrounded by a vast expanse of white creates a dreamlike space that may or may not exist. The placement of such quotidian objects in unnatural or fantastic situations questions the reality of the world in which they reside.

Mermaids are hybrid forms that violate natural law or, more specifically, contemporary scientific explanation. They are often depicted as beautiful yet monstrous creatures in legends and folklore. They are outcasts; abnormal curiosities. They are neither this nor that, they lie somewhere between, questioning the logic of natural order.

I form poetry. I use the word “AND” as a mode of expression and a structural tool for creating multiple dimensions in geometric and oblique forms. I believe “AND” is the most significant thing I can say to the world without imposing my ideas on people. For me, “AND” is a philosophy that is based on the experience of change as continuum, revolution, and drift.

Whether I am painting or sculpting, the manipulation of fabric is my primary interest. I apply black ink to wet white denim fabric in an assortment of ways to create my desired effect. I enjoy the optical play that occurs between stark contrasts of black and white. Conversely, in other work, I focus on the ethereal qualities in subtle transitions of gray. Some of my pieces incorporate blue and green ink because scientific studies have concluded that these colors have the most calming effect on us.

Over the last several years I have departed from the tradition of seascape painting and zoomed in on the water itself. The chaotic-seeming activity within the forms of turbulence seemed new and exciting to me, but I also recognized their origins in the studies of Leonardo da Vinci. I was inspired to take these foamy elements further out of the context of naturalism by sometimes giving them a darkened stage presence, thus heightening the potential drams of water and its primal importance as a substance.

By laying bare my process—through stains, protrusions, leaks, cuts, and swells—paint initiates a conversation about time and the vulnerability of form. My vertical “object-paintings” and “totems” embody different emotional and psychological tones, which reverberate in the room in which they’re installed. Stepping into the territories of sculpture and installation, I challenge notions of totality, integration, and completion specific to painting. The titles suggest literary characters as well as my self-awareness, affirming a formless motivation.

This work began as an inquisitive journey into my own identity as a black American. I asked myself who would I be and how would I view myself if all the information that I was inculcated with about being black was given to me without the negative connotations so inextricably entwined within the history of our nation. Ultimately I recognize that the transformation of the meaning of “black,” given its various connotations and what it means to be described as such in America, is a constantly changing thing.