STATEMENT OF WORK

The first artist must have been good at waiting—for their tool to leave its mark, for the fire to catch, for someone else to notice. The first museum, I’m certain, was a simple attempt to commemorate these efforts: neat piles of moss and bones, a catalog of passing animals. Emerging from this impulse, I create mixed media paintings that conjure existential and spiritual concerns through playful material and visual fragmentations. In Often When I am Being Myself (2023), I plucked a wooden remnant off the road—a truss? A stanchion? Festooned with colorful ornamentation, a Now N’ Later candy wrapper functions as an uncanny index of temporality, while a collaged poem from a 1970s hiking manual for kids reads, “When you are out in the wilds, use your eyes.” I approach found objects in my paintings with a sense of curiosity about their failures and possibilities, drawing attention to the aura and aliveness that first brought them into being. 

Driven by collecting ephemera and keepsakes, my work imposes a whimsical order onto the intractable artifacts and sentiments accumulated through daily living, envisioning a spirited materiality in which found and familiar objects are not merely things to be categorized, but elements with their own histories and potentialities. Bridging references to human evolutionary history, scientific diagrams, psychology, and religion, I draw inspiration from self-taught artists like Nellie Mae Rowe and Howard Finster, as well as assemblagists like Noah Purifoy for his use of expressionistic modes as social commentary. My aesthetic sensibilities are also formed by my experience growing up with a mentally ill parent creating art in the context of incarceration. My painting practice, which includes community-driven projects like my experimental exhibition The Museum of I Love You So Much and Sunday Show and Tell, a monthly public event I host in my studio, is motivated by a desire to engage with artistic practices that advocate for the creative autonomy of artists whose work often exists on the periphery of institutional recognition. 

Through painting, I work toward creating a layered visual archive that is both a personal and intellectual exploration of interconnected systems and histories. Working across multiple compositions at once, I begin with a surface—paper, fabric, or reclaimed wood—whereupon glue, tape, and paint cradle a symbolically layered archive of life as I am living it. My resulting assemblages of diaristic detritus blend colorful, cheerful compositions with a first-thought-best-thought approach to linework, always aiming to preserve the immediacy and sincerity of my process. In this way, my museum of interiority exists everywhere and always in the hyper-present, like a quiet, shifting presence swirling through the air.