about

My work is driven by play, exploring the eclectic tendencies and mundaneness of humanity. I
use the tactile processes of printmaking and drawing to create colorful visual fields that operate within the wheelhouse of charming and deranged. I am devoted to saturated color and anthropomorphized imagery, and drawing remains my most crucial tool. I particularly enjoy drawing’s direct relationship to mood, driven by tone and tension. I see my fondness for tension appear in different ways in the work. Most notably, the immediacy and silliness in my visuals contradict the labor and technicality of the processes that make the print. I often splice together shrouds of color and crude gesture to depict attitude and agitation, noise and warmth, distortion and warping.

Turbulent environments in my work convey my own fixations and rabbit holes, recently dance
floors, cheugy wallpaper, puppet theaters, playhouses, circus animals, and miscellaneous patterns. Love of mischief and nonsense lends to my obsession with irreverent humor, notably demonstrated in the Monty Python movies. I am interested in disjunctive storytelling, each scene providing a snapshot of a bigger idea. I imagine my compositions as different acts in the same performance or different rooms within a great, big funhouse. Funk artists like Jim Nutt use absurdity to create a window into deeper reflection; funk art is bold and raunchy, making many subtle declarations that can be easily missed. By combining fields of dazzling pattern and awkward drawing, I hope to reveal subtleties about systems of play.

The pieces are pretty and populated with soft-bodied, dazed figures that float in and out of their aesthetic landscapes. The characters in the work are at the same time cute and off-putting, whether in the spotlight or enveloped by pattern. The forms are folded into their spaces yet crane their misshapen bodies to stare directly at the viewer, creating real empathy in their weirdness. They almost exist in a record-scratch moment, frozen mid dance party or performance. Something about their passiveness suggests what started as play has shifted into a more ambiguous atmosphere; they are left lingering inside, dissolving into the patterns that surround them. Are they still playing, or are they simply going through the motions? Affect and noise chime in tune with the patterns, creating an “intensity [that is] disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration” (Ngai, 26). Play has morphed into excess, repetition, and something altogether like chaotic monotony. Humor remains present but is softer and
more incognito. Airbrushed polka dots and other patterns double both as structure and impediment; they construct the environment while also overpowering the space.