I feel moved to explore the unknowns and mysteries that propel human nature to keep thriving and searching, to move forward no matter the circumstances. In this body of work, I explore a dystopian narrative about the deterioration and atrophy of the earth that resulted from the human-created climate crisis. Through the medium of paint, I explore what it would be like to resurface from underground and find that the earth’s ecosystems had evolved to support new life.

 It is an odd thing to be inside a body, to be known within that body, read as a race, a gender, an ethnicity. These identities are activated by the gaze of others, invented by the gaze of power. We are lacerated into largely binary categories; these classifications determining the material realities enacted upon us.

 As a visual artist, I am fascinated with the inherent beauty of physical materials themselves, unmediated and unrefined. These works on canvas feature repurposed, foraged, and composted objects; a material vocabulary that follows no hierarchy. My paintings challenge the rhetoric of purity, refinement, and expressionism bound to painting by means of a “soil over oil” approach. Tapping natural materials as alternatives to brush and gesture, my paintings have a sense of immediacy that directly engages the social, cultural, and ecological concerns of the region from which they are sourced.

 My painting practice approaches the internet in a way that is whimsical, infatuated with the potential physicality of an immaterial but ever-present structure in my life. My practice is centered around portraiture, digital self-presentation and what it means to view and be viewed through an interface.

 As an artist, I make paintings that exist in the sliver of space between abstraction and representation. I look to the lived daily experience of the present coupled with the artifacts of the past. My work compresses time into the surface of painting, that old technology. Increasingly, flora, fauna, and natural phenomena hold my attention, as I wrestle with this imagery that we daily experience through our technology. Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet.

 My work examines collectivity in its fullness. Drawing on the worlds that my friends and I construct and occupy, I place them in conversation with other struggles towards liberation throughout history. The compositions arrange portraits of friends—both those living and those who’ve passed—into personal and communal records, imagined presents and futures. Whether depicting an actual occurrence or a theoretical one, they take on a richness that gestures towards all the potential arrangements of a life worth living.

 My studio is filled with scraps. Heaped in stacks of unsorted bins, they are the remnants of over twenty years of making and living. Survey of the scrap pile: A doodle-ridden restaurant napkin A stained worktable covering littered with ambiguous notes A crusty, psychedelic palette scraping A scribbled landscape from my kindergarten journal A used bit of masking tape edged with paint A large, wadded-up drawing made in a fury one night last summer

 The summer of 2020 brought chaos to the world. We were faced with a global pandemic and searching for peace and justice for people of color. The inquisition of Josie Love Roebuck’s heritage came into play during the Black Lives Matter movement: her identity, experiences, fears, concerns, and what she would like to change were thrown into the spotlight. Roebuck’s process addresses the contemporary complexity of identifying as biracial, where symbolizing pain and triumph, exclusion and acceptance, is achieved by layering fabrics and patching together portraits.

 107 My work investigates the intersection between the contemporary and the past to give agency to forgotten people, places, and cultural schisms. I incorporate discarded items like photos, thrifted clothing, and found objects from my life into the medium of painting. My paintings act as caretakers of these mementos, imbuing the work with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia through a combination of paint, sewn fabric, and collage fastened to canvas. In reusing found elements, I breach ecocriticism and throwaway culture, guaranteeing that each reclaimed memento is once again active.

 My work deals with color and identity. My goal is to compare ideologies about race, stereotypes, and belief systems to everyday colors and the perception of these colors in our environment. I consider my work to be a form of visual communication that uses simplicity and depth to express social and ethical issues. I want to create a conversation between the personal and public by using color and composition to express mood, situation, and ideas. By placing people and objects in common and uncommon situations, I can deal with specific subjects from various perspectives.