What is your work about?
My recent work revolves around the exploration of visionary landscapes. I tend to work in series: drawing, sculpting and painting, where artworks are in conversation with one another across mediums. My practice is grounded in joyful improvisation, and my work lives somewhere between abstraction and representation. I am most interested in the fluidity of image, object, and material, as I strive to bring a deeply felt sense of place into my work.
Artist Statement
Last summer I walked through Central Park to visit the Met, and after spending time with Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings, Central Park actually looked more vibrant while passing through it again. I wrote a short story about this experience, and now the writing serves as the backstory for the growing series of psychedelic landscape drawings I call the Psychotropics. Notably, drawing and writing are fruitful means for exploring the poignancy of being captivated by nature, whereas my smartphone images of nature fall flat. Using Central Park as a point of departure, I delve into the area of visionary landscapes, and grapple with my attraction and repulsion towards modernist expressive landscape painting. While I am influenced by paintings from this particular time in history, my drawings come from direct, felt experience with nature, and speak to our contemporary relationship to landscape, technology and history.
My sculptures, which I refer to as Crumples, act as models representing imploded panoramas. In Baked Brownie, I began with my silkscreen printed Instagram screenshot of an apocalyptic-like sunset over Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, CA, and responded to the memory of being there by sculpting the printed image. My sense of place is the driving force behind the way I sculpt, and I use any additional materials necessary to transform the image into an object imbued with my subjectivity. In the process of creating, I typically bring the sculptures to the brink of destruction, and then solidify the form to capture its tenuous state.
The paintings come from particular imaginary places as described in fiction. For example a scene in Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy Exogenesis was the impetus for Red, White, Black and Blue, and Very Close Very Far is an abstraction of a sinister, mythological landscape found in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. In these paintings I layer swathes of painterly gestures, using free association to guide my discovery of new imagery. Nest depicts an elusive, buzzing form, coming from a description in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.
The sculptures involve destroying an image to create newly found objects, whereas the drawings develop from an additive process of joyful improvisation. The paintings are a result of mining the subconscious, beginning with a sense of place, then materializing this subjectivity into newly found imagery. Across the board I leave traces of the process evident, such as including color testing marks in the finished drawings, exposing raw materials in the sculptures, and using straight forward gestural marks in painting to offer viewers a point of entry into the work. These key areas are on the cusp of transformation.
CV
Education
2014
MFA School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York, NY
2005
BFA Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Group Exhibitions
2014
MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fisher Landau Center, Queens, NY
United Against Speculation, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY
Networking Tips for Shy People, 200 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
2013
Shadows is Beast, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY
First Year MFA Exhibition, Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY
Magical Thinking, 200 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
hopeful? [Say Yes Until it Hurts], Pent House Gallery, Baltimore, MD
2012
CUMC Fine Art Exhibition, Hammer Teaching and Learning Center, Columbia University, New York, NY
2011
Put a Bow on It, Kraine Gallery Bar, New York, NY
Psssttt, Kraine Gallery Bar, New York, NY
Hot Ground, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY
Awards and Residencies
2013
Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
Andrew Fisher Scholarship, Columbia University
Visual Arts Program Scholarship, Columbia University
School of the Arts Alumni Affairs Fellowship, Columbia University
2011
Advanced Painting Intensive, Columbia University 2
2005
Hazel H. Huntsinger Memorial Prize in Painting, Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Bibliography
2013
New American Paintings, MFA Annual Edition No. 105
Experience
2014
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Basic Drawing, School of Continuing Education, Columbia University
2013
Co-Organized Magical Thinking, 200 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
Teaching Assistant, Plein Air Painting, Columbia University
Teaching Assistant, Figure Drawing I, Columbia University
Panelist on Works in Progress forum, Columbia University