Artist’s Statement

I make paintings, drawings, sculptures, and videos that talk about the body. I am drawn to boundaries both somatic and social. My work pokes holes in these boundaries. I am particularly attracted to the othered body as transsexual, disabled, intimate, and monstrous. Compelled by the horror of having a body and a rich research tradition that both supports and subverts this revulsion, my pieces are often considered challenging, though I am most motivated by a search for community and freedom of expression.

My visuals have a deep relationship to horror as both feeling and genre, drawing inspiration from images of the body under stress and eliciting visceral relationships with viewers. In doing so, I wrestle with pain. Pain expands the vista of the inner self (do I feel it here? or here?), drawing awareness to parts of the body previously unidentified with, expanding limitations. I am often interested in expanding limitations, pushing boundaries, and reaching into the overwhelm. 

I am a research-based artist, working in the psychoanalytic tradition. Fantasy, sex and death, and the formation of the self provide continuing themes in my exploration. Contemporary psychoanalysis has expanded in recent decades to include kink, gender expression, and queer theory, while a similar expansion has occurred in contemporary art. The roots of this stretch back into modernism and beyond, and I am equally influenced by my contemporary peers as I am by foundational makers like Francis Bacon. I locate myself within this tradition of radical, disgusting queers. My method of artmaking within the othered body is applied research, political act, and human experience.

Color is an overriding factor in my process as a transdisciplinary artist, representative of passion and builder of illusion. For me, color is everything - volume, space, light and dark. It is important to me to bring this painterly quality across disciplines, a high contrast that brings a level of uncanny surrealism to my images. I paint on raw canvas without prep or stretcher bars, emphasizing the surface as fabric - a connecting point with my sculptural work. 

At times my pieces challenge the viewer. The othered self is a challenging figure who crosses the boundaries that keep us safe. But like Frankenstein’s Creature my intent is not to upset but to seek community with those who understand. My work is a hand extended in friendship to those who find desire in disgust, radical deviants pushed to the edge of society that I instead frame in the center. I place myself as the dominating figure in much of my imagery, as the only body that I can never violate.