2024

I make paintings, sculptures, drawings, and installations with paper, paint, fabric, waxed linen thread, and aluminum cans. Colors, words, body parts, and objects from daily life jostle, fold, and weave together. By exploiting the tension between the 2D and the 3D, I seek mystery and movement within paintings and sculptures. Plaid, both as a material and as an organizing principle, appears repeatedly in my work.

The urban environment and its accidental forms are deeply compelling to me, especially what happens in gutters with tin cans -- brightly discarded aluminum whose pliable yet durable, intensely chromatic forms yield gorgeous geometries. Walking and biking, I experience the city as a printing press, smashing and layering words and materials into exciting and unexpected forms. My paintings and sculptures revel in the slippage between the constructed and the natural, the hidden and the revealing -- playful, sexy, dirty, and defunct.

As the virtual world places increasing demands on our attention, slowing down for the sensual is essential. In my studio, association is queen: things travel, split up, eat spare parts, get eaten, and are reshaped, trashed, and reclaimed. When a piece feels visceral, inevitable, and alive, I know that it’s done. 

"And", 2008

How do we decide at what point things stop and start ­­– be they bodies, spaces, or time periods? Responding to a world where things don't stay put, I take the word "and" as an organizing principle. What is the nature of the “and” that both joins and divides the following categories: form and content; 2D and 3D; nasty and beautiful; structured and falling-apart; abstract and represented and referential; handmade and manufactured and natural. Because the very use of the word "and" implies a separation of these qualities that can never be truly accomplished, my work emphasizes states of continuity and simultaneity. Objects accumulate, moments accrue, meanings pile up. I work by gathering materials I find at hand both in and around my studio and in my daily travels: primarily items that have been discarded, whether by intention or accident, in the street or on the sidewalk. These spaces are ones of continuous circulation and chance events. I engage with these objects and materials through processes of collection, arrangement, sculpture, drawing and photography. In doing so, I am trying to find structures of meaning that express the tension between separation and connection.