I am interested in the phenomenology of perception, and its subjective and constantly changing nature. My latest body of work explores the perceived confluence of being that can occur in another person’s presence. These works also investigate the experience of love and the confrontation of otherness. My subject matter is autobiographical, and by extension queer, as I often paint representations my personal love-objects: partners, lovers, friends. My ideas about otherness, visibility, and love and are influenced by queer and intersectional writers: Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, and others.
In the oblique approach to representation and the slippage into reveries of abstraction, I find similarity with how awareness vacillates between the physical and the psychological; how sensory fragments intermingle with emotions, distractions, and social dynamics. For me, abstraction is also a queering strategy of camouflage and manipulating the legibility and speed of my images. As David J. Getsy points out in Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction, queer reading practices have historically valued “insinuations, chance adjacencies, and alternate perspectives” as “tactics of survival and worlding.” For those who are looking and are familiar with queer culture, there are subtexts and visual clues into the queer nature of the love and desire I depict. At the same time, abstraction allows the work to function on a level that transcends its particularity.
I explore the sanctuary that can be found in the presence of another person, an animal, or in a memory brought on by a sentimental object, culminating in a feeling of oneness with the object of one’s adoration. My paintings are often born from moments in which subjects become porous, and the negative space between self and other is filled with connective, vibrating matter; two irreducible consciousnesses emulsify into a solution that also includes the cat, the lamplight, and the dust on the sill.
My point of view in this work is like that of a bee hovering above, drawn by some sweetness in the air. I translate the sensuousness of a presence into paint: honey-like, rough, patterned, shimmering. I reach for new, unimaginable colors that might constitute a secret language of energies, looks, and endocrine signals, like the flower’s ultraviolet flagging to the bee’s specially adapted vision. By creating a sensuous in-person experience of paint and through the defamiliarization of imagery nested within each picture, I encourage the viewer to hover around these paintings; to slow down, pay close attention, and become the mindlessly attracted bee, drawn to buzz around in front of the work and glimpse it from different angles.
My current paintings are tenuous frames for understanding, attempts to capture and hold something of fragmented, indecipherable memory. If I can say something even indirectly about an experience, I have to give the whole thing a shape, and shapes within shapes, like an author dividing a novel by paragraphs, chapters, and sections to narrativize their vision. The frame’s tendency to memorialize, compress, reduce, and idealize, reflects an uneasy psychological truth about the selective and idealizing functions of memory. I have an urge to re-examine and frame the past, to haunt these moments and the objects and people they contain like a bee haunting the hive, probing the storage cells, busily depositing its nectar.
In the oblique approach to representation and the slippage into reveries of abstraction, I find similarity with how awareness vacillates between the physical and the psychological; how sensory fragments intermingle with emotions, distractions, and social dynamics. For me, abstraction is also a queering strategy of camouflage and manipulating the legibility and speed of my images. As David J. Getsy points out in Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction, queer reading practices have historically valued “insinuations, chance adjacencies, and alternate perspectives” as “tactics of survival and worlding.” For those who are looking and are familiar with queer culture, there are subtexts and visual clues into the queer nature of the love and desire I depict. At the same time, abstraction allows the work to function on a level that transcends its particularity.
I explore the sanctuary that can be found in the presence of another person, an animal, or in a memory brought on by a sentimental object, culminating in a feeling of oneness with the object of one’s adoration. My paintings are often born from moments in which subjects become porous, and the negative space between self and other is filled with connective, vibrating matter; two irreducible consciousnesses emulsify into a solution that also includes the cat, the lamplight, and the dust on the sill.
My point of view in this work is like that of a bee hovering above, drawn by some sweetness in the air. I translate the sensuousness of a presence into paint: honey-like, rough, patterned, shimmering. I reach for new, unimaginable colors that might constitute a secret language of energies, looks, and endocrine signals, like the flower’s ultraviolet flagging to the bee’s specially adapted vision. By creating a sensuous in-person experience of paint and through the defamiliarization of imagery nested within each picture, I encourage the viewer to hover around these paintings; to slow down, pay close attention, and become the mindlessly attracted bee, drawn to buzz around in front of the work and glimpse it from different angles.
My current paintings are tenuous frames for understanding, attempts to capture and hold something of fragmented, indecipherable memory. If I can say something even indirectly about an experience, I have to give the whole thing a shape, and shapes within shapes, like an author dividing a novel by paragraphs, chapters, and sections to narrativize their vision. The frame’s tendency to memorialize, compress, reduce, and idealize, reflects an uneasy psychological truth about the selective and idealizing functions of memory. I have an urge to re-examine and frame the past, to haunt these moments and the objects and people they contain like a bee haunting the hive, probing the storage cells, busily depositing its nectar.