My paintings portray compressed and bustling spaces and are inspired by anything—from films and books to travel and memories. I develop the paintings using a compilation of unrelated images taken from photographs that are either shot on location or found through Internet research. As part of this process, I make digital sketches of the composition, using Photoshop to answer some of my initial questions concerning space and color.

As an artist, I find it my duty to candidly critique the culture I’m living in and form part of. My work is generated in that way, and it has become a tapestry of my life that transcribes and reconstructs the societal idée fixe of the black body in popular culture, while also undermining the notions of gender normativity within black subjectivity.

People are mirrors of their environments, interacting with the past, present, and ideas of the future, right? What I mean is, where, when, and how mainly define us, passing through us. Therefore, I confound the space and subjects in my work; the characters are not only placed inside a setup, they are the stage themselves. These assemblage-people end up being a joke emerging out of simplified symbols: tits = feminist; cigarette = romantic painter; tongue = rejection, and so on. Sometimes failing at what they’re attempting, as artifacts of lost cultures

I’m currently engaged in the creation of two interrelated bodies of work: Cosmic Debris and Wavelength(s). Both explore, in different ways and through differing media, the vastness of the universe, the transience of the individual, and the life force that connects all things. Aesthetically and thematically, neon is the grammar that links together these two bodies of work. The narrative juxtaposes the impermanence of a single life and the infinite nature of life itself, a dual state of being that is both unsettling and comforting. These short phrases rendered in

I experiment with the medium of painting—reconstructing the distinct roles that paint, raw canvas, and rectilinear support play in art-making. The paintings are concrete and abstract. I work in collaboration with the material, asking it to have a voice in the outcome—to reveal itself. I create circumstances that allow the materials to resist, or comply with, various manipulations. There is a consistent tone of self-referentiality, which allows the work to sidestep heavy intention and preference the cycle of action/ observation/discovery that happens in the studio.

I am primarily concerned with formal and material issues. While my works are restrained and reductive in composition, value, and color use, the additive and accumulative nature of my process and the visible evidence of facture presents them as possible carriers of meaning. Architectural references are suggested via structure, geometry, shape, texture, and the forms themselves; a builder’s logic is always employed. My work does not comment, narrate, or declare, and with the materials I select, from varied origins, the works perhaps exist simply as discrete artifacts of my involvement.

My paintings feature humorous landscapes where representation is fetishized. Using a maximalist approach in paintings that slip between modes of representation, I address the process of responding to the spatial illusions of painting, materiality, and imagery. My work features warped spaces where figure and ground merge. Drawn lines help demarcate the slippage between what is and what might be, calling attention to the constructed setlike spaces. Using clichés as props, the work points to a larger cultural obsession with the idealization of the everyday and its link to the “feminine.”

My paintings feature backgrounds of pieced-together drawings of imagery taken from my everyday life layered on top of one another, sketchbook-style, with colorful hard-edged lines painted on top. Through multiple forms of application, the paintings jump back and forth between references to traditional painting and mindless doodles. This process mimics the fluidity of browsing the Internet, moving from thoughtful political articles with global ramifications to humorous GIFs and skate videos. I am interested in how protocols of digital processes play out, and blend with an

Lately, I have been focusing on the plethora of marks, signs, symbols, and patterns that structure our daily experience. I approach painting using a variety of subjects as infrastructural components. Employing a cut-and-paste methodology, I assemble images that reveal the process of their creation. Juxtaposing material and illusory factors, I call attention to the amorphous rift between representation and reality. My pieces are informed by the mundane components of both our shared and private day-to-day experiences. I make these pieces with the aspiration

My paintings set the stage for addictive personalities and puts them under a spotlight. Often pulling from past work environments (typically bars) I explore an ongoing theme of nightlife, while adding snippets of dreams, superstition, and fantasy. What does superstition look like? A seedy underbelly, sometimes exposed in plain sight and at other times peeking through the shadows. Through the haze of debauchery lurks a sinister psychological frisson in which an altered state of consciousness subverts reality and appearances become deceptive.