I make art about what it feels like to exist in this world of information overload, uncertainty, and choice paralysis.
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 supports for our techno-industrial lives.
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. Stability is temporary; coherence, fugitive. 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 and norms and fights are infinitesimally insignificant. And yet our cares are beautiful, and special, in the emptiness. The systems of understanding that we make for ourselves: language, math, science, but also markmaking… art… painting! … are very obviously arbitrary and inadequate. But making them is also necessary, if we are to live.
By drawing connections — between natural and synthetic, between one story and another, between human-scale and cosmic, between self and other — we create islands of stability amid chaos.
We can be eyes in the storm.