What is my work about?
There’s an aura of dread that hangs over all human history. Wars, plagues, and other such calamities, the great civilizations reduced to artifact and ruin. This dread continues now into the present day where it seems we’re always on the precipice of some ultimate doom, another peak oil or nuclear holocaust, a world of violence, countless dreams of death looming just beyond the next calendar year. There’s also great beauty and sweetness, though, and a persistent strangeness we’ve somehow managed to get used to. How do all these things interact in the mind? A sunset or a landscape and the pubic hair of a lover or the smile of a politician or an old executed king? This is all in the timeline of human experience. All this strangeness coexists. We are the same humans who believed in Zeus and Poseidon.
Artist Statement
These drawings for me are a form of meditation and study, a personal engagement with history and mythology and its relationship to the present, with special attention paid to skin and hair and piss and shit (which are of course all essential components of the human experience). I want to understand history as more than just the major movements but as the collective reality and imagination of all humanity. I want to renew the strangeness of existence, to have a more ecstatic vision of the world, to create drawings that vibrate against each other in awkward juxtaposition, that taken together in series feel like a vision or a fever dream.
I’m interested in a more literary sort of art, with drawings that retain a hyper-specificity while also functioning as symbols with a thematic depth or meaning that stacks from one drawing to the next, each acting as a word or sentence in a dense novel of imagery.
CV
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EDUCATION
2013 MFA Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2009 BA Studio Art, Oakland University, Rochester, MI
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2014
Group Velocity, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY. Group show.
2013
We Object, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY. Group show.
David, The Shirey, Brooklyn, NY. Group show.
2009
Empire, Flint Street Gallery, Lake Orion, MI. Solo show.
2008
Interrupted Cadence, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI. Group show.
2007
art ex libris, The Kresge Library, Rochester, MI. Group show.
PUBLICATIONS
CAVITY ZINE VOL. II, curated by Jennifer Mehigan, 2011
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2013-14 Artist Assistant, DAOlab, Brooklyn, NY