What is my work about?
My current paintings and charcoal drawings relate to the body. I charge them with my physicality through the intensity of the making process. I activate the surface and the images into being through continuous gestures of material application and erasure. I strive to imbue each work with a sense of urgency through movement and rhythm that pulsates within a specific structure of color and shape. The bodies of amassed marks and traces take on an anthropomorphic feeling suffused with light, temperature and a sense of mood. I am interested in making images that do not rest, ones that are visually ambiguous in that they elude the namable and live in a space that constantly slips between figure and ground, abstraction and figuration.
Artist Statement
I like to look at moving bodies—animal, vegetal, human. I observe how they move in space, the energy they emit, the light that travels through and within them. In my lyrically abstract paintings, I use color and anthropomorphic forms to invoke the body. I paint to give shape to the idea of a bodily presence that transforms the space of the canvas into its own particular environment. My paintings invite the viewer to encounter compositions where limb-like elements, a feeling of animality along with shapes & colors symbolic of the landscape all collapse to evoke a new, subjective body and atmosphere.
In Sunset Genie for example, the dominant bodily force is the blue genie that sweeps into the picture plane from the right. It travels leftward to nestle with a yellow arm-like shape, which in turn expands and creates perspective by jetting forward to the viewerʼs space, pulling one into the painting. A pink and purple striated sunset surrounds and accompanies the circular flow of this paintingʼs various parts. In Iberian, it is a purple avian/equine body that poses, more classically and in profile, on a hazy ground.
My large paintings are sized to my out-stretched body, which allows my approach to be performative and athletic: my painterly process involves the constant accrual and removal of thin layers of oil paint so as to embed the surface with traces and erasures, trips and cover-ups. A collection of imprints and memories. These acts of repetition and readjustments are what excite me in making a picture. The transference of my physical energy into the ever evolving shaping of the image allows me to keep things open and moving on the canvas.
Dancer and Of Iris are forcefully fleshy paintings, red and carnal with leglike forms extending to the edges. The umber mass of Dancer, scared by vigorous mark-making (and un-making), fills the space as it ascends, leaps through yellowness and foliage, and runs off the canvas, all the while being held theatrically between arched corners.
Figure merges with ground, body collides and overlaps with landscape in Body Forest II, Purple Drama and Tickle-Arm. The title of Body Forest II announces the image: the central bright blue body with its purple goopy hairdo is embedded in a dense, all-over green forest whose pink protrusions sit flatly on top, in the foreground. In Purple Drama, sharp diagonals, a muscular purple core and a large green leaf-foot play out dramatically and whimsically in a field of abstract leaves and heightened contrasts. Tickle-Arm, however, offers a ghostly, heavily rubbed surface for the playful encounter between the yellow arm and the angular lilac flora.
I carry the bodily and performative aspect of my paintings into my black and white drawings. Physically demanding, the charcoal drawings of The Bird Series exude energy and movement through their muscular, graphic and raw quality. I apply charcoal densely to play with amplified value contrasts. Each of the drawings has its own spatial dynamic: bird-like creatures fully inhabit the space of the paper to create an internal logic where figure interweaves with abstract ground, where perspectives are plural and where motion keeps expanding upon itself through its internal circularity. My works on paper provide me the freedom to develop a more recognizably figurative type of imagery (birds) where narrative and formal structures work together to suggest a world that borders on the mythological.
Despite the descriptive stories I enjoy sharing about my subject matter, the spaces that operate in my paintings and drawings largely remain ambiguous and unexplainable as they are not namable per say, or classifiable as one thing or another. And yet they are graspable and felt as spaces that push and pull, that recede, that shift and flatten at the same time. They are environments in which marks and gestures, repetition, erasure, muscle memory, surface grit, addition and subtraction all collide to create a compositional whole that is open, honest and sincere.
CV
EDUCATION
2014 MFA Visual Arts, Columbia University, New York, NY
2008 BA magna cum laude and Honors, History of Art and Visual Arts, Brown University, Providence, RI
EXHIBITIONS
2014
Leaning Steeples, Show Room Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY
Columbia MFA Thesis Show, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY
Networking Tips for Shy People, 200 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
2013
Columbia MFA First Year Show, Wallach Gallery, New York, NY
Magical Thinking, 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
2012
Tape Modern No.26 RIP, Tape Modern, Berlin, DE
2011
Metrospective 1.0, Program Gallery, Berlin, DE
2010
The Portrait Show, New Bedford Art Museum, MA, US
Barbar, Apartment Gallery, Berlin, DE
2008
Senior Honors Show, Sarah Doyle Womenʼs Center Gallery, Providence, RI
Show Me Some Portraits, Senior Honors Solo Show, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, RI
2008 Annual Juried Show, Bell Gallery, Providence, RI
CURATORIAL
2014 Co-curator of Pale Fire featuring Michael Berryhill, Lukas Geronimas, Daniel Heidkamp, Ryan Johnson, Anne Neukamp, Bea Parsons, Mary Reid Kelly, Alexander Roth, Shahar Yahalom; LeRoy Neiman Gallery, NY
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
2011 Prisma, Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin, IT (performance in collaboration with Rafael Danke)
2010 Prisma, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, DE (performance in collaboration with Rafael Danke)
2010 Form-it-Able, Kreuzberg Theater, Berlin, DE (performance in collaboration with Nezaket Ekici)
AWARDS
2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant Nominee
2013 Emily Fisher Landau Fellowship
2012 Pincus Kossow Fellowship
2008 Roberta Joslin Award for Excellence in Art
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2013 Teaching Assistant, Columbia University, New York, NY (Drawing II, Halsey Rodman); Assisted in teaching students to expand and deepen their drawing techniques and to think conceptually about the medium; taught a class and assigned homework throughout the semester
2013 Teaching Assistant, Columbia University, New York, NY (Painting I, Anna Conway); Assisted in teaching students the basics of oil painting involving color mixing, painting from observation, the nude and eventually the imagination; taught a class on portraiture and assigned homework throughout the semester