Sugary sweet cereal, cupcakes preserved to last a lifetime; junk food. It’s the taste of America. It’s what we eat. It’s who we are. The insatiable American appetite is set on a path of consumption. Devouring to the point where we are left with nothing, nothing but the consequential garbage. Quintessentially American, junk food is not just part of our diet, it epitomizes our cultural ideals and social norms. Through my work, I strive to invoke reflection on a culture focused on mass-consumption and mass-production, where the negative aspects of overindulgence are often forgotten or ignored.

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour
Cute, cute, cute in a stupid-ass way.

Probably because I’m a curator and writer, I’m most interested in the larger narratives surrounding individual art objects. Here, the term “individual” is a misnomer, as no single object is truly singular, and any visible autonomy is a temporary illusion. No, Really, It Gets Good, Just Wait. ( ) Just Wait, It Gets Good, No, Really. ( ) The studio itself is a narrative framework. Thanks for reading.

To a child, everything is truth. They are resistant to the distinction between fantasy and reality that we make as we grow older. Objects bear witness and are often times animated into participation. My canvas is the stage where the animate and inanimate intermingle, a place where the fictional becomes real and vice versa. It is the oscillation between illusion and reality that has the power to transform and suspend time.

I think of myself as a figurative artist who strives to depict animals as verbs rather than nouns. Freed from the rules and limitations of the empirical, as an artist I can avail myself of the luxury of dismissing the named subject, the noun-subject, as a classification with limitations. The really exciting part for me is not in discovering what something is, but in discovering that it can do so many different things.

I am interested in exploring and subverting the expectations of conventional masculinity. Through my drawings and paintings I investigate the relationship of supposed binaries, such as masculine/feminine and gay/straight. More specifically, I am concerned with how, collectively, we read the various signifiers of gender in relation to those binaries. I am also interested in how men perform their gender and sexuality according to culturally mediated roles.

Some of the things I’ve heard about my work in grad school:

I create paintings that reflect the ephemerality of spatial experience through large-scale installations and smaller two-dimensional paintings. Through my work, I poetically and carefully construct microcosms of my experience in the world. I collect found marks and forms, which I mold and touch to function anew in the context of my paintings.

My work plays with the ambiguities between flatness and infinite depth. I create an illusion of emptiness through shapes concealed in a dark palette, a deep void suspended in time. An ambivalent landscape, simultaneously familiar and strange, unfolds through displaced remnants of architectural structures. Wandering fragments of passages, arches and doorways reflect a history of no-place from an abstracted past. They evoke a longing for a different time and place. The images are isolated from their origins; they compose a world exhausted of life.

This work reflects my interest in the relationship between feminine identity, social interactions, and institutions. The implementation of uniforms and group activities is presented here not only as depiction of the practice itself, but more importantly as a metaphor for the mechanisms of gendered socialization. The girls in my paintings are being trained to become ladies, as signified by their identically feminine garments. But within this attempt at assimilation, an intricate play of yearning, mischief, communion, and rebellion develops.