My work incorporates elements of painting, drawing and sculpture, collapsing two and three dimensions to create renderings of the human figure. I engage the space of painting as a site of mirroring, inviting the viewer to consider how we compartmentalize, and classify ourselves. The wooden stretcher bars act as a skeletal structure, the stretched fabric and dense layers of paint as skin-line membranes. I work as an image-surgeon, in the tradition of Dr. Frankenstein both building and depicting a human-monster. By making art from dead materials, I imbue them with an artistic vitality and bring them to a state of “life” akin to that of a zombie.

I explore how recognition occurs in an image of a human body that exists on a threshold, or in an inbetween state. I depict suggestions of this state in the gray area between an illegible configuration of lines and an identifiable human form. When is the body situated between human and thing, between “he/she/they” and “it”?  What visual or iconographic components are necessary for a body to be identifiable as “human”?

I am interested in infusing subjectivity or bias into the authoritative black line commonly used to compartmentalize the body in medical diagrams, outline figures in cartoons, and map geographic territories.  I appropriate these contours and boundary lines in a way that acknowledges their instability and impermanence.  To this end, I ask: can a line truly represent a fixed border, and also a porous point of crossing at the same time?  I explore this conceptual question in the context of human anatomy, treating skin, in its arrays of folds and layers, as a porous boundary line. While a painting can be a skin-like veneer for the surfaces of architectural structures, my work interrogates  unstable boundaries that exist between layers of skin and clothing, muscles and bone, or painting and wall.

The notion of the zombie can be productively aligned with these ideas. Zombie connotes a body  that exists in the liminal state between three countervailing pairs, alive and dead, individual and unrecognized mass, and living body and cadaverous flesh. I am interested in the pivotal point in which a body is visualized as alive or dead, and the bodily states that seem to contradict these perceptions.  In most depictions, the skin of the zombie body is in an unstable state of peeling and decay, often revealing the body’s interior.  I treat the logic and process of identification in the fictional world of zombies as an entry point into exploring our real-life with our relations with those people who exist in the margins or in a state somewhere between life and death.

Alongside my ongoing painting practice, I consistently take on more site/theme/event-specific projects.  A recent example is a collaboration with artist, Klea McKenna, in which we created a participatory drawing performance based on Dennis Oppenheim’s “Two Stage Transfer Drawing” (1971).  Participants lined up and allowed an image to filter though them in a manner similar to the game “Telephone”.  As each person felt the tip of a pen drawing on their back, they simultaneously drew the sensations they recieved on the back of the next person in line. In this performance, skin is reappropriated as a permeable membrane on multiple levels: as a surface for drawing as well as a site of input, output and translation.

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A number of works over the past few years pertain to ideas of costume and veiling:

Clowns, comedians, and cartoons provide layered structure and content for my work.  They often perform in a way that uses humorous language or appearance as a guise for ideas that are perhaps too progressive or too genuine to be discussed in a non-joking manner. I see the clown’s costume as merely an exaggerated form of any of the other uniforms, clothing, or even mental barriers we wear in our lives.  When we wear these types of uniforms, we are able to disguise our bodies, and take on more recognizable identities imbued with many assumptions and stereotypes.

How do we categorize ourselves?  We are drawn to uniforms, costumes that beg labels and stereotypes.  We revel in routines and habits that give us a daily sense of security.  Our role-models perform these activities flawlessly and we pay close attention to every superficial detail.  Things are portrayed so perfectly, so static. How can we regain our sensitivity to an image we have seen over and over again?

In the “Campaign Collage” body of work, I reconfigure the format of political propaganda posters depicting side-by-side running mates.  I superimpose costumes onto mediated role model-esque figures in order to amplify the superficial layer that we most commonly encounter.