By directly engaging the accumulated science fiction cultural expressions of the early twenty-first century, with the most recent speculations gaining scientific currency, THE MULTIVERSE WORKS series examines the paradoxical quest of redefining meaning lost to a time of phenomenal technological progress and supreme dominance of the information media. Using a confluence of visual conditions, I am trying to create an imagined language, which charts the consequential interrelatedness between structured orders and randomness.

These paintings are about searching through discarded rubble and finding beautiful things. I find pieces of rusted, dented metal debris and I paint on them in a way that doesn’t obscure the original texture and color of the object. I seek out objects that are notable for their unique stains, rust, and damage, and I let those characteristics guide the painting.

My work focuses to a large degree on the synchronizing of seemingly disparate content and contexts, such as rainbows, addiction, home, family, painting, theory, science, computers, and religion. These themes originate from discursive and dendritic research and converge to form an amalgamated self-portrait that is imbued with a statement.

I have been drawing on paper persistently throughout my life, creating images of people, places, things, and ideas. The imagery and ideas in my drawings have certainly changed over the years. However, many of the features of the modern land/cityscape that I recall from my childhood have endured. A reoccurring theme in my drawings comes from our relationship to the manmade environment and the metaphorical language of images.

My process honors a combination of wandering and constructing, where drawing becomes a way to navigate the intersection of physical, theoretical, and imagined projections of the world. These projections might be the world that is to come, the world that has passed, or the world that is in a state of being formed. In exploring these formations, I refer to both organic and architecturally constructed growth, searching for the ideal, or catastrophic, results that might occur when they are combined.

Using the language of abstraction, my paintings integrate collage and assemblage. Acrylic paint is applied to canvas, cheesecloth, aluminum screens, plastic, and rug-hold. These materials are torn or cut into strips, reassembled in layers, and suspended from wooden supports.

My recent body of work—a series of large-scale charcoal drawings—examines ideas of dislocation and exoticism. I explore cross-cultural and hybrid identities through clichéd references to tropical culture together with Pop and Victorian-style elements.

With the aim of questioning notions of place and belonging, I employ different strategies to subordinate the contradictory to a delicate and imaginative order. As the past, the present, the exotic, and the familiar collide, absurd and fantastic panoramas arise.

In a time when our attention, and to a large extent our culture, is very often commanded and shaped by the superficial and destructive aspects of our society, the role of art and the artist must be one of a subverter and challenger to such things, rather than simply an imitator or champion of them. My work is intended to be an impetus for self-reflection and objectivity; it’s an appeal to the viewer to stop and honestly question the true role that he or she plays in society and the environment as a whole.

“That’s the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically predisposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled will link one image fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence.”

—Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids From Hot Climates

As far back as I can remember, my interest has been the human story. This is the thing that inspires me day to day, just knowing about other people. There are stories unfolding around me all of the time, whether belonging to me or not, and I wish to document them. My work is about the things that have happened to me, the things that I know, and about the people that surround and affect me. At times they might say or do a thing that keeps churning in my head until it finds itself in a painting. They are my strongest influences, these people, what they do, and their reaction or mine.