Updated Artist Statement

My work employs painting, drawing, printmaking, live art and performance to explore subjectivity within an ever-changing world.  This work ranges from deconstructed landscapes, to multiples, to time-based abstraction.  I am interested in drawing attention to and confusing a viewer’s awareness of their own body’s movements within different spaces.  To achieve these aesthetics, I combine unconventional materials and techniques to activate unique surface qualities that emphasize the viewer’s physical relation to the work and enhance its overall illusion of movement.  By building, carving and sanding on wood panel, applying high gloss resin, gel medium, quartz powder and living material (such as grass) I create materiality and contrast within a painting’s surface. 

Using geometric forms, ranging from simple concentric squares to complex fractals, I compose formal painting elements into ordered and chaotic measures of time and rhythm.  By contrasting layers of illusion, flatness, dimension and physicality, I create optical tensions within the viewer’s perspective that enhance these rhythms.  As a result, the viewer may experience recognition, confusion, order and a chance to decipher space, yet be overwhelmed by flatness.

The Cyberspaces are a series of wood panel paintings that map the metaphysical spaces described by cyberculture theory.  My intention was to construct a multi-dimensional space that could be accessed through bodily subjectivity to simultaneously bend, disassemble and reconnect linkages within an ever-changing network.  To achieve this, each panel employs linear and fractal geometry to weave a complex coil of contradicting illusionistic, sculptural and architectonic spaces.  By presenting the panels face up and activating the surrounding architectonic space, I increased the dimensionality of the surface and created a topological movement within each composition.  As a result, the rigid Cartesian grid becomes an aerial landscape in which the fractal’s emergent complexity bends various levels of relief into shape-shifting territories.

The geometry behind my work was inspired by painters Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Sean Scully, academics like René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Benoît Mandelbrot, Elizabeth Grosz, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, and a diverse array of subjects, such as: linear perspective, maps, dialectics, panoptic vision, order and chaos, Fibonacci sequences, surface roughness and fractal dimensions, architectural spaces, territory, nonlinear spatiotemporal paradigms, contextual framing, deconstruction, cyberculture theory, feminism, Zen solids and voids, mazes, church interiors, cave painting and gestalt and color theory.  Some of my underlying themes include looking at complexity via self-similarity (the concept that the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts), subject/object relationships, relativism, dimensional multiplicity, contradiction, impermanence, blurring the line of authority and presenting painting outside the context of the wall.

In the future, I plan to continue my investigation into the relationship between illusion, flatness, dimension and physicality within different spatiotemporal paradigms.  My next projects will continue to integrate geometric structures further into my process.  I see great potential to challenge my ideological preconceptions by attempting to map the entropy of organic forms within nature.