During the last four years I have deliberately practiced art disregarding, if necessary, coherent visual reading (the stylistic aspects of the art work). Art making moves in very organic ways, like growing, aging, or a life experience. Art and life are directly linked in my practice. Coming from one person’s perspective, daily life and world events become one subjective opinion when used to represent commentary. History and memories are fictions, transgressions as well, and I allow them to exist in that matter.

My work is inspired by people, places, and things I see in everyday life as well as images from old books, journals, and found photographs.

I assemble paintings in the way I imagine writers create stories; each element reacts to the next, the setting moves in and out of importance, there are surprises and then loads of re-writes. I am a collagist and I find my inspiration with a combination of library research and a habit of keeping my eyes open to images in unlikely places, like old shoe stores or laundromat posting boards. I am also a bit of a sponge–the music, words and forms of my surroundings bleed heavily into my work. I like to play in the space between planning and spontaneity.

By using words and glass I expand the duality of meaning, overlapping in order to create tension and conflict. Employing typographical processes, I create illusory space. Inside this space I want to examine how we make the choices that define ourselves.

My work utilizes drawing, painting, and sculptural practices as a way to mirror natural and cultural events and build form in a complex way. I am interested in the process of layering information and building everyday observations into resonant material matrices. These paintings are small oil paintings on mylar that lay flush on the floor. They are based on satellite images whose subjects include bombing sites, trampled shrines, a prison complex, and other places that have figured large in the Western media’s news coverage of events in Iraq.

I am a first generation Vietnamese immigrant. My family was part of the wave of ‘boat people’ that escaped Vietnam after the war. The trip was a near-death experience. I was seven years old at the time. I grew up in the west (Toronto, Canada), but I do not feel totally a westerner. My family was very traditional. Yet, neither do I feel fully Vietnamese.

I am interested in the juncture between Design and Nature, specifically design that is meant to be consumed in the form of fashion, decoration, art, and music. Perhaps in today's urban-influenced culture, in light of concerns about the environment and rapidly dwindling resources, people are changing their relationship to nature. More and more I am seeing wall-mounted decals of birds, silhouettes of tree branches on t-shirts, and artwork that seems to gravitate toward very specific animals and other natural imagery.

I was born and raised in Ringle, Wisconsin, a small town of roughly 1400 people. My early life was filled with extensive forest explorations, drawing and anything that dealt with He-Man. As a child I wanted to be one of two things when I grew up: a comic artist or a zookeeper. The zookeeper dream ended when I was attacked by a rampant deer. A few years later, on a separate occasion, I was stampeded by another. I currently live in Chicago. I am a happy person…a fantastic family, a hot girlfriend, and Japanese toys all attribute to that.

The work I create dislocates, mutates, splices, and recombines images from the natural world to form entirely new environments that exist beyond the boundaries of nature. I use a mixed media process which involves silk-screening, traced monotype, painting, drawing, and collage. Each of these techniques allows me to record and describe my interpretations of nature in a non-representational way. I abstract and often simplify forms in an attempt to depict, in a non-objective way, the most basic structures which comprise their essence.

My work is a puzzle that I create while trying to make sense of issues that are larger than life to me. Drawn from landscapes I have encountered, it begins randomly, then progresses to a meditation on different sources, often political or environmental concerns. The slow process of cutting allows me time to untangle truths from layered connections.