Born in Kansas and based in Chicago, I make work centered around imagery from the American Midwest. Wood-paneled basements, roadside memorabilia of the West, and agrarian symbols were the norm when I was growing up. My work increasingly investigates the ideological function of this imagery, both for political purposes and for the formulation of male subjectivity. My drapery works, the Scenery series, are made of pieces of plywood I have cut and laced back together with cord. I photograph actual draped textiles and modify the images in Photoshop. While flat, the works picture

The relationship between image and material is interesting to me. The materials I use announce their presence. Forcing copy machine toner through a silkscreen creates a paradox—the image looks unrepeatable, but the material speaks of reproduction. This forms a scenario in which the material and the image are both fighting to be the content of the painting. I complicate this relationship with oil, spray paint, and screenprint. I explore how these disparate languages fail to create a discernable hierarchy within the image structure itself, as well as from one piece to

By constructing imagery from pieces of packaging, advertising, and other discarded materials, my recent work mimics the manufactured environment’s physical and psychological omnipresence in a highly compressed form, while attesting to the reflexive nature of perception. It is impossible to entirely disentangle or separate seeing from memories of having seen. Our brains collect fragments of visual information, neurally mapped as countless mental representations, which are assembled to provide shape, contour, and meaning to our subsequent experiences. Through collage and bricolage, I evoke

I think of the Equivalence paintings as social bodies. They are reductive archeological conversations with modernist abstraction, both remembering a position and locating a place, making the painted social body a site of occurrence. As a site, they articulate the operative and associative formal language of relationship. They conjoin dimensionalities, revealed and concealed visibility, and geometric and organic forms with handmade and manufactured processes.

Out of the nameless gray void appears a true sense of the real. In its own making, out of its own grayness, reality appears.

I am fascinated with the materials and techniques familiar in a painter’s language, reconfiguring and generating them into something new.

My art is an extension of myself. It is everything I see and feel in the world. It is my play, it is my diary, it is my friend. It is a ritual that is part of my existence. My art is narrative. My art is abstract. I go about making art the same way a kid would stroll through the park. I collect visual objects, emotions, ideas, and feelings throughout the day. With this collection of information, I begin to create a narrative for the world around me.

Through experimental animations, ceramics, comics, prints, paintings, and drawings, I explore forms that stray from their point of origin or intended state and morph into something new. I actively follow the mistakes, mistranslations, and tangents that inevitably present themselves as I work; the intersection of humor and failure is at the heart of my practice. I translate the sense of life, time, motion, and natural straying that occurs in drawn animation into my work in other media.