An unbounded categorical list:
In-between bodies: My work explores illustrations and embodiments of the liminal states between several countervailing pairs: alive and dead, person and thing, human and animal, individual and unrecognized mass, the pronouns “he/she/they” and “it.”

Skin: I’m drawn to artistic media that mimic epidermal layering, decay, and transparency. My interest in skin is as a permeable membrane rather than an impenetrable shell.  I’m experimenting with this bodily boundary in ways that show it as in-flux with the body’s interior as well as the surrounding atmosphere.

Zombies: Zombies are often identified by various physical traits, which can vary from a walking corpse to a cartoonishly exaggerated form of decomposing flesh.  In most depictions, the skin of the zombie body is in an unstable state of peeling and decay, often revealing the body’s interior.  Zombie is also a pop-cultural category that negates those who are relegated into it.  My work examines the physical traits that get attributed to zombies and how they relate to this stigmatization and a sense of the uncanny.  I am also following the ways the word zombie has spread into a multitude of places in Western culture, and how it can be re-defined to talk about contemporary issues.

Clowns: like animated archetypal costumes, blurring the line between human and cartoon.  Framed by a history of using humor and humiliation as a guise for progressive ideas and unspoken “truths.”  The surface layer of a clown highlights the unstable and often antagonistic relationship between costume and flesh.  While the costume performs an erasure of identity, it grants the person a different sort of voice and a more public presence.   Like zombies, for me they are protagonists, deserving visibility and recognition.

Painting and Drawing: As a young boy, these modes of expression were a very important form of communication for me.  They still are.  A painting can be a band-aid-like, temporary veneer, veiling the wall that holds it aloft with varying degrees of opacity.  My work wraps layers of fabric, ink, acrylic, or oil around wooden skeletal armatures.  I additionally examine illusion-making and the space between depiction and embodiment by moving back and forth between two and three dimensions.

Black lines: I’m interested in regaining a sensitivity towards the legibility and the authority of the black line.  My focus is its use in outlining figures in cartoons, defining territorial boundaries on maps, inscribing bodily contours in medical diagrams, and forming iconographic or glyph based languages,

Participation:  In various collaborative projects I have had the opportunity to explore many of these ideas.  Most recently I worked with the ScreenLab artists to create a pirate radio station in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco, called Tender Transmissions.  Through this same group of artists I worked with Klea McKenna to create our own version of Dennis Oppenheim’s “Two Stage Transfer Drawing.”  Additionally, Alexandra Pratt and I worked with MG Gallery to put on several Sentence Drawing Sentence events.

Questions: How does recognition occur in an image of a human body that exists on a threshold, or in an in-between state? What visual or iconographic components are necessary for a body to be identifiable or categorized?  Why is in-betweenness often stigmatized and feared, as in the case of the zombie? What threshold must be crossed to recognize and identify a body as a zombie or as a human?  Can a line truly represent a fixed border, and also a porous point of crossing at the same time?