Your Teacher
I am a practicing artist, printmaker, designer, and arts educator. As an arts educator, I believe in the power of art to transform minds and attitudes. Equally important studying and making art can build critical thinking skills necessary for 21st-century job competence. Including but not exclusive to creative problem solving, spatial understanding, reading and analyzing visual information, using your hands to make something, and patience. I look forward to getting to know you and helping you find and use your authentic voice. I encourage you to share your experiences of life in your art, have the confidence to ask for help and to help others, celebrate our differences, and not take yourself so seriously.
My Artist Statement
Transformation and the catalysts that precipitate change over time are primary sources of motivation for my work. The mechanisms of visual persuasion, such as flags, logos, and emblems: referencing anthems, ritual, and other social-bonding experiences, become the organizing principles for my work. As a printmaker and artist, I am predictably interested in such methods of change: Process is an integral part of my work. I am in search of the next translation, the next transformation as it is seen through the eyes of history, by the ones that make and experience or suffer that history.
With a background in media and design, I weave complex and multi-layered compositions that address formal concerns while at the same time I infuse meaning by using contemporary symbols of power, branding, advertising and signifiers that blur the distinction between governments, religion, and corporations. These source images are re-contextualized into motifs, patterns, and insignia that overlap and interact to present the viewer with something that is chaotic, layered, and intricate yet at the same time familiar, ultra smooth, and embellished.
Contemporary symbols of power continue to blur the distinction between governments, religion, and corporations. I use the same psychological apparatus that the political and business world employ in order to reveal certain contradictory aspects of our contemporary culture that is altering itself at an unprecedented rate. By doing so, I hope to reclaim some of the responsibility of history-making in my individual artistic process -- showing the complexity of personal history/social experience and its connection to current political, and global change.
Travel is a key component of my experience as an individual and artist. I lived and worked in Germany for more than 5 years, England for 3 years, and studied in the New media Atelier, at the Academy of Fine Arts-Prague, in addition to receiving my Masters in Print-media from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I have traveled extensively throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Morocco, exhibiting in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Bulgaria. I formerly served as the Assistant Director and Faculty for the Prague Studio Program at SAIC, an enriching and exceptional experience for me. One of my great joys is to experience new places and be inspired. Recently, my work with Art for Health has taken me to Haiti and Dominican Republic. Art for Health was started five years ago by a group of artists and medical doctors committed to providing and improving health care for under-served communities. As artists, we support the work of the global health program at Rush Medical Center by traveling with the medical teams to the partner communities.
" The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page" Saint Augustine, A.D. 354-430
