B. 1980 Houston, Texas

BA, 2002 University of Chicago, with honors

MFA, 2008 Massachusetts College of Art and Design, FAWC​

 

My career began with a background in alternative process photography (1998-2002) but quickly found success in large-scale textile sculptural installations(2006-2016). In 2019 I received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant for a series of paintings about love and loss and finding oneself through tender heaviness. 

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I create art as a form of devotion and resistance. It is a ritual cast through the placement of objects to tell a story using any medium as the translator. Devotion is an act of sustained attention returning to materials, memory, and feelings that I am familiar with. Resistance is my refusal to let these things dissolve into silence. Together these ideas form the core of my practice that fluidly moves through a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, and installation. 

 

My work is research driven and marked by the accumulation of shapes, layers, details, and textures mirroring the way meaning is built over time. An in/coherent dreamy messiness runs through everything I make and as I feel my way through a project, staying experimental in mark making is an important part of the process as is the prep work before I make those marks. Before any marks are made, I research, read, observe, and absorb ideas and images, and events taking place. I get curious with the threads that unify the things I am drawn to; for example the objects I have arranged on my coffee table, the smell of the lilacs blooming in the tree outside of my window, the sound of the new york when I step off the commuter train, the shape of my crush’s elbow, and so on. I stay curious about the perceived world around me and stay open to the hidden one that emerges when I surrender to just being in the moment. Once I have gathered enough information to be pulled to create I go through the process of preparing canvas. I like the preparatory ritual of sanding and thinly layering medium mixed gesso to build a velvet surface that absorbs the first layers of paint. Then when the feeling moves me I begin to work in large washes and counter balance them with smaller irregular marks, allowing the story to emerge through shapes and objects and layers.  This way of working originally began as journal drawings of daily accidental still lifes and to do lists. Over time it has developed into paintings of objects anchored to the memory of observation. I try to anchor the ideas and objects to each other through the spatial plane of the painting itself. 

 

No one is big enough to hold what happens to us is a quote from Lydia Yuknavich’s book Chronology of Water. I think of this quote often and use it as a springboard for what my preare trying to do. They are containers changing shape over time, but still trying to preserve the yearning we have to hold impermanence. The ideas of devotion and resistance both try to stave off impermanence through repetitive iterative structured actions. With each new still life/memory painting, I am trying to preserve aspects of time through small suggested recognizable objects or moments that can transport myself and the viewer to a shared humanity.

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