STATEMENT OF WORK

I make relief sculptures and paintings that explore power relationships, tensions and contradictions around ideas including home, safety, property, and work.  The visual incongruities inherent in the relationship between two and three-dimensionality mimic the schisms between these ideas (or ideals) and the enactment of reality. My imagery takes cues from such sources as iconic literary characters, contemporary and historic news stories, symbolic animals, and cartoon language.  I develop paired down compositions that are carefully considered to highlight active relationships between antagonists, implied narratives, and formal elements. I build custom frames and specific display devices to emphasize pictorial relationships and enhance a self-conscious viewing experience. These enigmatic compositions depict sites of action or potential action which implicate the viewer by eliciting empathy, desire, longing, cultural memory and imagination.  For example, "Apparatus" initiates a dialogue around the use-value of trees, which equally includes the possibility of childhood rope swings and the history of lynching.  

It is my hope that the work creates a space to contemplate the violent history and oppressive forces that affect our concept of self, relationship to others, and our thinking and actions as individuals, families, collectives, and society as a whole – forces, not always overt, but insidious and present in the weaved fabric of everyday experience.