Most of my paintings riff on themes of death, landscape, hidden imagery, and the male body. I am motivated by my need to draw attention to nature and spirituality. Painting figures makes the pictorial space more accessible to viewers, and painting landscapes imbues the land and sky with meaning and creates a deeper communal awareness of the environment. By rendering the local world in its radiant beauty, I promote its preservation. By remixing the human figure, I develop an image that reflects the complexity and vulnerability of the human experience.

Pictorial space is malleable, shifting, and subversive. I’m looking for a finely calibrated balance of idiosyncratic elements that creates a new, oftentimes paradoxical spatial proposition. Space is not the stage for an event; it is itself the event.

I make paintings, drawings, and objects that feel simultaneously absurd and plausible, such as my Rising Water Improvised Rescue Device, a helium balloon–powered, crudely built glider that carries a life jacket to those lost at sea. These inventions may not be about solutions but about questions, about seeing things to be done and saying, Let me do it, about wondering if irony still has a place in a world of unmanned drones, spray-on tans, and reality television.

Painting

A salute,
Of a thing to itself,
Itself an other.

There is nothing behind the surface,
Only the surface behind itself,
Itself behind the surface.

Oh, so many movements,
Of the surface,
Of the surface.

Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum

Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum Dudu Dum Dum

I depict the figure in transitional states between being and ghost image, the statuesque and the formless, and painting and sculpture. Each object is a material gesture of the psyche fulfilling the need to solidify a permeable and porous body. My effigies are created, manipulated, and destroyed through ritual. Torsos are cracked, propped up, and covered, faces are absorbed and imbedded in cloth, and paint is picked off and reapplied to appendages.

When we want to learn about distant objects like stars, we observe their light broken into its component colors. Based on the wavelengths that are missing from these spectra, we can discern faraway atmospheric compositions. There is something about painting in this. I like to examine systems and coerce relationships. I try to route out the causal links and visual narratives therein, find fragility, and open up spaces for the imagination.

In my work the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each part is relatively simple, easy to handle, interchangeable—an inert part of a large collection. By putting a population of individual components together in an unfamiliar environment that has varying degrees of “terrain” and “topographies” in changing focus, unlimited growth is possible. An improvisational arrangement begins with gravitational pull and random interactions become more sophisticated and systematic until a higher law emerges.

Driven by my genuine interest in painting—as a discipline, an object, and a history—I see art-institutional structures as responsible for shaping the conditions of the medium’s relevance and production. Experiencing the museum as an artist, I view exhibition, collection, interpretation, and preservation as activities that determine art’s trajectory. I acknowledge this framework—and the artist’s reciprocal relationship with the museum—as an aesthetic and political site.