Philosophical Context:
My central interests are concerned with the mechanisms of the phenomenon when human desire, driven by various cultural ideals, is projected outward, then immediately re-produced, packaged and finally consumed by its very source as something it lacks.
Artist Statement:
Through a process of translation, conversion and forging, I strive to draw relationships between seemingly disparate situations. Rooted in the visual and conceptual strategies of late modernism, minimalism and conceptual art, I trace highly idealized forms through the language of advertisement and commerce. I do this to shed light on the relationship between philosophical thought and desire and their perversions in material form. Even as I work in relationship to the language of commerce and its homogenization of experience, my goal is to point to our need for individual interpretation by use of a reformulated type of abstraction. Increasingly, I see both the practice and product of making (art) as a metaphor for the individual’s need to forge unique relationships to our progressively standardized experience. In light of this conviction, I use abstraction not to distill towards the universal but to instill a desire for difference. In short, my work is a site of negotiation.

My two-dimensional work draws inspiration from the tradition of landscape painting, albeit I always read the landscape as constructed and ripe with ideologies. Whether it is the setting of a socialist realist painting, an exaggerated Thomas Cole vista, the atmosphere of a Rothko color-field painting, Ruscha's hybrid spaces, the spaces employed by electronic billboards, or the artificial worlds of Second Life, there is always an ideological point of view governing the 'image.' My paintings and drawings reference phenomena from the built environment such as outdoor advertising structures and various tools of commerce. Occasionally, I also use film stills and other phenomena culled from visual culture. From the apparent, I abstract towards a certain kind of singularity to momentarily reclaim subjectivity and individual agency. My color palette refers to mediated images rather than to the observed world. I embrace the mannered, contrived, over-saturated and manipulative nature of the digital image.

In my three-dimensional work, the slippage between the ‘universal’ and the particular is emphasized in terms of place and movement. I do this by introducing a generic form to a specific process, such as shipping an object from location to location, or by pairing a universally available product with a sound-recording captured in its transit between specific locations. Whereas in my two-dimensional work I begin with a specific situation and abstract towards something more subjective, in the third dimension I tend to translate general forms into specific instances. It is this transition between the ideal and the real that my work aims to capture.