By using found and salvaged objects and building materials from dumpsters and construction sites, which are signs for masculinity, religion, and social class, I am able to change the intended use in order to expose the objects and building material’s framework. This exposure reveals an awareness of the material’s place, purpose, and their relationship to the objects and concepts within other groups.  The materials act as dialect tools that navigate between the different groups.  This connection is important because it not only breaks down cultural fears, but also unifies the groups in terms of their vulnerabilities.

At its basis, the premise of my artwork comes from the process of connecting people through their imperfections instead of connecting them by cultural standards, similarities, and strengths.  I see us all bonded by our faults and shortcomings and the things that we refuse to examine.  For me imperfections are not so much a judgment, but a commonality.

My paintings are the beginning of a series entitled, “In the Pursuit of Happiness.” They are selective instances from ordinary life situations. The scene in Spoon is an image of a
young couple, content as they lay in bed together. The man is positioned behind the woman, gently grasping her hip. This gesture elicits a sense of caring and comfort, but
also a sense of possession, and is intended to be the central focus of the painting.

The idea that our partners become possessions explains a false expectation of happiness. This expectation is caused by absorbing ideas about life from a lifestyle saturated with
Hollywood movies, television, and corporate advertising. It is related directly to the way our wants and needs are centrally concerned with material objects.

My latest series in ceramics is called “The Shower Room.” This series is comprised of public shower room and restroom facilities painted on Greek amphora vessels. The
figures in these spaces are either secluded or exposed to one another. In either case, they describe the presence of personal space in our society, and a difference between the
individual of our current culture and that of the ancient Greeks.

The problem with personal space is that is in part, manufactured as a byproduct of popular culture pushing sex as a product. Our need for privacy is our own fear of
inadequacy with society’s projection of idealized aesthetic appeal. The contrast of societies generates a reason to question the origins of individuality, and the importance of
our own self-perceptions.

For myself specifically, I was awakened to these ideas after a sexual experience, and was made increasingly aware of my own fluidity and ideas of physical emptiness when that “other” was not still in my physical space. This emptiness was only identified as so when the energy of the other was left within the space.

Artist, Ann Hamilton spoke about idea of the female as a liquid, never able to maintain her form or hold her boundaries. These ideas not only ring true, but also drive my current body of work. When connecting this notion of the woman as a formless creature to new experiences of relating, the work strives to reference the residual energy and restlessness that results.

The use of long exposure enables the onlooker to view the energy captured within and around the female form. The use of smaller images forces the viewer to become intimate with the story, and delve deep into what exactly the photographs illustrate. In documenting myself as a sort of hazy being, not able to escape the space in which these encounters take place, I hope to reference Hamilton’s ideas of the liquid woman as well as document new beliefs about my own boundaries.

Drawing is the most primal language of people; it is vibrant, experimental, and reveals integrity in both the maker and the viewer. Parenting is human; it is cultivation, it is connecting broken lines to solid lines, it is intimacy and humility. Ones mistakes and elations are evident in both of these processes. The primal accretion of life and history is visually evident: a mark.

My influences span every generation of my family and the material that I use and collect is reflective of the experiences I have had or am having with my family. My own children provide a source of immediacy and vitality. Their scribbles, toys, and world of make believe are in a continuous circulation between my studio and home, a microcosm has been created in which the interrelationships between drawing and parenting; the record of life, solidify as I scratch my own existence in history.

My grandmothers, who I spent considerable time with in my own youth, have been instrumental in the ways of lifestyle and wear. Being in their presence and listening to their words, seeing what they have collected and admiring its time, has raised an underlying sense of nostalgia for the past. As I hunt for material I look for colors and texture that remind me of what I feel and see in their homes.

My current work simultaneously contrasts the joy and tension of fatherhood. As a husband, and father of two boys I have been forced to develop an intense sense of the exhaustion and purity of everyday life. Moreover, the work is the record of young parents being overwhelmed with the thoughts of finances, a lacking support system, sleep deprivation, and the arduous task of being present. These realities resonate in the bold lines, blurry backgrounds, and layered material in the drawings and paintings.

I recently applied to graduate school and was unfortunately denied. I found myself unable to work and unable to express how I was feeling. I began to revert into the stereotypical male figure that suppresses his emotions. I found myself reading the letter daily, each time getting more and more distressed. I finally decided that I was going to make this letter work for me instead of against me; I was going to bring the emotions it generated into my work. The first piece in this series, Rejection: BSU, stems from the text of the actual letter. I have chosen the key phrase that use to get me so depressed, and by using it in my work; I have turned it into one of my favorite parts of the piece.

I began to see text as an approach to beginning a dialogue with my audience. I want the viewers to have their own experience of the work but want to provide them with a framework of language on which to build that experience. For example in Euphoric, I define the emotion, in text, in the broadest sense so that the viewer and I share a common language as a path to the work. Next I implement a figure that is unresponsive to the text. He is like an expressionless statue, unfaltering and without feeling. This aspect of the work is to address the stereotypical male in today’s society. He is a landmark in the experience that I want the viewer to see.

This body of work leads me to analyze how I live. I find myself expressing feelings and thoughts more openly with those around me. The goal of my work is to create a conversation with the viewer that leads them to reflect on their own lives. I want the viewer to be able to relate to the work. Looking back, I feel a sense of deep satisfaction that I am finally able to express myself, and profound sadness that this is how our society has shaped us.

This struggle for authenticity and self-hood is addressed through tedious and repetitive drawing and scraping away to reference traditional feminine work. By choosing to use traditional working methods that are both meditative and physically restrictive, I am thinking about how adhering to social expectations can be simultaneously comforting as a tool of camouflage, and alarming in terms of losing personal identity.

In my experience, pressures to be polite and accommodating blur the lines between behaviors that are pleasing to others, and what desires are internally motivated. My work questions whether it is even possible to maintain boundaries of a self that is by nature in constant flux.

My paintings distribute their scale similarly, competing for human space. The large paintings use 3-dimensional surface to create depth. The subject matter’s desolate environment pushes forward becoming tactile while the surrounding area is pulled into a dark emptiness.

The subject implies numerous associations to things utilitarian and human. The minimal and barren characteristics reveal enough information to formulate a question without answering it. I am less interested in illustrating an idea but rather creating a setting for dialog between the viewer and my work to exist.

I find that much of my identity is linked to the loss of important people in my life, especially women I had been very close to. A rampant theme throughout my work suggests a loss of immediate control in a particular situation, a time and place that has been fractured.

Allowing myself to explore these feelings of grief and healing, life and death, permanence versus the temporary; has permitted me to create a world of staged, dreamlike illusions where my characters exist and interact. It is important to me that my work creates a story that visually resembles what could be experienced in a dream or within past memories, intertwined with fable and traditional storytelling. Most of my current works are self portraits.

I use a variety of symbolism based on traditional art history works, stories and personal experiences. For example, goats are a well-known symbol for lust. In Roman mythology they are also a symbol of motherhood. Goats eat dandelions, which are a Christian symbol for grief. In the middle of it is a human character experiencing and reacting to these emotions and ideas. It is in these images’ symbolic connections that suggests a fascinating play between the characters within the drawings.

To me, drawing is exciting because of its direct, uncensored process. All of the marks my hand makes are honest, real and devoid of a barrier between the artist and the drawing surface. Drawings can stand alone or be built upon by using a large array of additional materials. Building upon the original drawing is often a complex task because the process lends itself to more experimentation than the original drawing may have presented. Creating works in alternative mediums allows me to engage in a ritual of process and linear decision-making that effects how the work will turn out in the end.

Due to my intuitive desire to ignore uncomfortable and difficult experiences, the process of working with volatility and into an eventual controlled environment gives me a sense of humility while understanding the troubles from which I’ve come and where my art emerges.

Scientific images and diagrams are also an inspiration for my work. The unique organization of diagrams, often though the use of color, is one of the things that I utilize within my own work. The figurative elements of my work also have a distinct source. For each of these pieces I chose to address specific people. This was mostly to express the impact that they have had on my ideas, but also to incorporate important ideas about the history and progression of science.

The interaction that takes place between different individuals is a specific focus of my work. Communication and the sharing of ideas, in combination with genetics and evolution, are the ways that people can change and grow from one another. Therefore, it is important to me that a conversation exists within this body of work, not only between pieces, but also between my work and the viewer.