statement of purpose

I make collage, drawings and paintings that explore systems of communication and transportation as vehicles of physical and social mobility. By combining established formal pictorial vocabularies, I create pictures in which the nature of modern mobility is presented as a duplicitous narrative of success and failure.

Working from source images comprised mostly of institutional, cultural, tableaux (such as academia, art, science, and sports), I employ tropes in order to examine contemporary culture through the lens of history. I manage controlled and contingent material applications flat, graphic elements, to create visually engaging images that question as much as comment. Moving between general and specific events, in addition to utilizing the simultaneous presence of background and foreground, affords me opportunities to tell stories of mobility in which themes, time, and settings shift in and out of focus. My work walks a fine line between pure aesthetic pleasure, nostalgia and something more theoretically rigorous.

Implicit in my work is a sense of dark humor, imbued with hope that the contemporary American cultural landscape can move past simple critique. My work strives for a seemingly impossible efficacy.