I make art about the complexity of truly connecting with the world, with nature, with other people, and with myself.
The work features human likenesses, silhouettes, natural textures like plants or fossils, and pieces of technology. I pay specific attention to ignored infrastructure such as parking garages, pipes, conduits, circuits; omnipresent items that support our techno-industrial lives but to which we rarely pay attention.
These elements are overlapped, layered, collaged. It’s impossible to take in all at once. From a distance, each image evokes the scale and feeling of blockbuster science fiction films, but what exactly is meant to be happening in the swirling, vibrant imagery is unclear; up close, objects dissolve into gestures and marks. The work generates a push-pull dynamic between distance and closeness, confusion and pattern-recognition.
Humans are tiny creatures, fragile in a vast and hostile universe. Wonder and horror are acceptable reactions. Laughter is another. Existence is absurd. Our standards/norms/fights are infinitesimally insignificant. And yet – our cares are beautiful, and special, in the emptiness. There may be some way to make sense of it all, but it’s unknown and probably unknowable to us. The systems of understanding that we make for ourselves – language, math, science, but also markmaking… art… painting! – are very obviously arbitrary and inadequate. But they’re also necessary, if we are to live.
Forming connections, finding strategies to make a little sense of things – these are ways to create islands of stability amid chaos.
We can be eyes in the storm.