Statement

My work has a lot to do with a love for lines. The ways they delineate, create thresholds and cause thin spaces where things can exist and be indefinable for a brief moment before crossing over. I love that lines can be straddled. My work exists in these liminal spaces and positions: between form and concept, conscious and subconscious, real life and TV. Here characters become sculptures and sculptures become characters. Inanimate objects take on personalities, begin to interact, star in sitcoms. Animate performers act like found objects, are placed, piled, manipulated while staring blankly at an unseen void. Videos do bad impersonations of drawings. Photos move in next-door, invite themselves over, act wacky. Performers spring (or stumble) back to life: play drums ferociously, get violently drunk, wrestle each other to the ground, work low-level management positions.  Born from authentic scenarios and emotions, ruptured and stilted by moments of incongruity, my work is in constant pursuit of that moment of derailment.  Here objects, gestures, and images collide head-on, causing a mental misfire, a visual glitch, or a double-take, upending narrative structure in what Kant refers to as the “evaporation of expectation.”

This love for lines is not a purely aesthetic appreciation. It also pertains to the lines that make up the invisible script of social mores and the rules programmed and conditioned into and by the human mind. The lines our own characters speak everyday. Lines that are both scripted and improvised in equal fashion, perhaps simultaneously, much like my own work. In this sense it is an exploration of semiotics, the daily linguistic nuances that are constantly shaping our relationships. By approaching art as a ‘character’, such as a middle manager, a castaway, or a new father, interacting with other ‘characters’ be they animate or otherwise, I am engaging in a consciously futile effort to capture these subtleties of being and communication.  I know it’s like grabbing water: I will always be left with nothing more than a residue. Thus my work is a reflection of a ridiculous attempt, with all its discomfort, confusion, and humor.