Artist Statement

My work seeks to understand personality through exposing nuances of hidden memory (tucked away safely or haphazardly due to trauma/shame or otherwise), blind assumptions around gender (masculinity) and unconscious behavior in my domestic space. 

Having experienced deep states in meditation (where internal and external become blurred) I have experienced that coalesced energy, or consciousness, has an apparent randomness regardless of how organized it appears. Personality, observed under this paradigm of meditation, appears shifty and vague, clarifying what's manifesting as something recognizable and real in one moment, and obscured in the next - like a haunting - ghostly and transparent.  

To help surface these nuances of lapsed/obscured/displaced memory, I conduct privatized, intimate performances, documented by digital video and still photography.  These performances are either edited and remain as video, or the stills are used to create oil paintings. I perceive the paintings as still-documentation, highly fetishized, frozen moments of living performance.  The paintings often have multiple frames either literally represented or expressed through materiality, within the canvas, conveying passages of time. The video is sometimes marginally edited, other times obsessively so, as if a character through the editing process itself, surfaces, demanding expression.

The mixed media pieces are bi-products from the performances and are an investigation and contemplation of temporal materiality, hence the usage of leather, animal hide, and hair. 

The blurred digital images of classical paintings are investigation on the disruption of power relations and beauty. The paintings selected are of people who represent the bourgeois, European aristocracy - holders of power and wealth in the western dominate culture.  The blur is an attempt to offset this power. Through obfuscation of the original painting I intend to create a new image to be objectified by replacing the original with a ghostly digital remanent, thereby, creating an echo of previous authority and replacing it by a new object(ive) of beauty.