I am an interdisciplinary artist creating works spanning image, video, sound, sculpture, and immersive installation using a variety of physical and digital media. I choose still and moving images which hold personal association with specific time/place/feeling which when shared with friends and strangers become an ongoing inquiry into the pathways, limitations, and instability of experience and perception, a hazy porousness the only true constant. Methods such as layering, transparency, distortion, and blending foreground the inarticulable, ephemeral, and peripheral as the true subject matter, an expression of the magic and melancholy of what is always just out of reach.
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image from series I Could Talk To You Forever
An early memory of a snowstorm in New York City instilled in me a reverence for stillness, light, and liminality (and of course for nature). I’ve taken thousands of photos of snow, initially intending to paint from them, but I soon became absorbed in the digital process itself as a way of translating a fleeting emotional experience into something perceptible, an ongoing practice in reverence for the incapturable.
image from series are u here or far way or why
images from series what it feels like to want something
My process is iterative and experimental, a practice of discovery rather than an attempt at resolution. The associations I have to recorded images and sounds may be recognized or even shared by others, but they are translated from my perspective and the material is often manipulated several times over and re-inserted into the work, and so the act of recording/play-back accentuates the layers of subjectivity.
Manipulation of images, video, and sound leverages the underlying structures of digital media to probe the boundaries boundaries of sensation and construction, evidence of the fundamental instability and contingency of reality and selfhood, influenced by the Derridean concept of deconstruction. My work often blends digital processes with analogue modes such as drawing or movement, reflecting my curiosity about digital technology’s capacity to shape contemporary ontologies by generating new forms of physicality and spaces for inhabitation, both for the individual and in the context of collective meaning and experience.
I do not see art and technology as separate. digital space is a lived space, is real and mutable, as proven by the effects of cyberbullying and digital organizing. I use digital tools to make perceptible the instability that has always existed: in selfhood, in material, in meaning. I manipulate images not to replicate emotion, but to express the magic and melancholy of something always just out of reach. became a way of translating a fleeting emotional experience into something perceptible, while still preserving its impermanence. The iterative nature of the work stems from an overwhelming wealth of possibilities, reflecting the exponentiality of emotional states, of “potential”, of alternate universes, of simultaneous growth and fracture.
The method of image combination comes out of an attempt to process the disorientation of being alive - the way pieces of past lives, memories, death, life, consciousness, unconsciousness, past present, the local the global, the personal, the collective, all are present at once, the impossibility of completeness.
The iterative quality speaks to form as well, as the work often takes shape as a series; I like to show elements of process, as I think the progression of a work is a window into the mind, perhaps leaving a trace of the feeling or thought process that sparked the creation of the work. I do not generally have an outcome in mind - instead each subsequent layer, action, or image is a product of immediacy rather than to achieve a certain effect, although at times I do have an intention of “creating more distortion” for example. I see this resisting of teleology as a practice, meaning the intention is the effect (much like meditation), and can act as a subversion of the commodification of aesthetics, time, and desire.
Although my work is currently more digital due to ease of access, painting remains a central to my practice as both a method of representation and as a site of touch, gesture, and physicality. It serves as a remnant of human interaction with material and subject matter. How is meaning created in translation from dream to physicality? What separates the two, if anything? I paint from life as well as from images, which I have often manipulated digitally, and sometimes incorporate painted or drawn elements into digital projects, playing with the muddiness of concepts of originality, presence, and reproduction. These connections extend into a broader love/hate relationship with material objects and ownership itself - how owning something changes its tone, how looking, touching, and possessing are fundamentally different modes of relation.
In collage and sculpture, I’m drawn to materials that hold both solidity and effervescence, such as textiles, bubble wrap, beads, foam, certain textures of paper, and glass, which I have also incorporated as imagery into my paintings. I like visual elements that blur the line between concealment and exposure, presence and absence.
I believe it is worth mentioning here that by day I work as a bench jeweler, crafting pieces out of fine metals and gemstones. I believe this line of work is a natural offshoot of my love of texture and materials, and blends with my interest in technology as well. I have always had a fascination with gemstones, and I think materially they exemplify a paradoxical solidity and fragility contained within, as well as an awe of natural phenomenon - a sustained disbelief that the natural world contains such beauty.
An exhibition titled, “is it that obvious?” questioned the psychological weight and assigning of meaning to material objects, particularly within the context of privilege, consumerism, and identity. The work took a playful approach, toying with the formal properties of objects to consider and disrupt material mediation of reality. I painted illusionistically on both traditional and nontraditional surfaces, transforming materials to complicate their function, associations, and aesthetic roles. This approach interrogates how aesthetic qualities are imbued with ideological significance, reflecting and reinforcing the constructed values and meanings of art objects and the social ideals embedded within systems like the art world and gender.
A central part of this project involved handcrafting material objects including undergarments, which hover between utility and artifice, operating at the edge of visibility - a subject chosen as a way to thinkthrough the act of perception itself both outwards and internally. I hand-sewed these garments as a way of inserting my own presence into objects made for another’s body—an act of care, disturbance, and attention intending to blur the line between hiding and showing, silence and spectacle, shame and seduction.
The work depicts subject matter evocative of the body without direct representation, speaking to a curiosity regarding the power of associations with materials, textures, images, and forms to draw on the psychological and emotional responses of viewers. a flutter at the edge of suggestion of rituals enacted in private, the universal yet unsightly elements of personhood.
I approach sound the way I approach image-making: by layering, distorting, and blending material collected from field recordings and abstract instrumentation to build textural sonic landscapes through intuition and emotion. I often work with music and image simultaneously to create one immersive experience. This process suggests the dependent/relational nature of embodied experience - the effect of the psyche on environment and vice versa. I’ve more recently found poetry to be a natural extension of my practice as well, taking comfort in the medium’s inherent acceptance/acknowledgement/appreciation for what is not said/written, what is inarticulable, the option to use words like colors and textures. This also This relates to my interest in digital technology shaping meaning and collective experience - how, for instance, the negotiation of meaning in a text message becomes a site of semantic creation.
I further my understanding of the body as both subject and medium in my engagement with dance. My interest in dance has to do with the embodiment or lack thereof of psychic experience, as well as the negotiation of the self within space-time and within social and political contexts. I am currently developing a collaborative dance piece that uses an intuitive, and sometimes pedestrian form of movement in a meta exploration of dance as a medium, revealing how perception and intersubjectivity are inherent when expression is inseparable from the physical body, and which reveals both individual and collective identities as not fixed but as transient, relational, and emergent.
I have an interest in embodiment/disembodiment as mediated simultaneously through both individual and collective experience. I have combined this interest with my appreciation for electronic music and the club/dance/rave scene to collaborate with others to hold imaginative "rave" events where the overall environment is carefully considered and dance/beat/melody/lighting/fog are used intentionally to create an environment where one can lose oneself, to experience the not self or maybe to accept that experience. The fog in particular is an important aspect of these events because it allows one to be both alone and together at the same time, to crate spaces of transformation and shared transcendence.
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