Artist Statement

CURRENT WORK: Stories

Stories is a new body of work exploring the concept of Self-Storytelling — the stories you tell yourself and how they profoundly shape you and conjure your world. The series aims to bring attention to the limitations of the consciousness of self-stories and what happens when you bring greater awareness to these thoughts and beliefs. How do your stories affect your perceptions? How do they affect others? If you are living one story can you stop telling it and choose another?

Each painting in the series is a unique, open story created by a random or subconscious combination of disparate images pulled from both old and new photographs, social media, friends, family, and daily life. The figures are often found in surreal circumstances and dreamlike, abstracted landscapes which point back to the subjectivity of perception. Each painting relies on the relationship found between its human and animal characters suggesting archetypes, mythologies, and instances of coexistance that are both a celebration of the natural world and elegies to its destruction.

The viewer is invited to enter through their own personal experiences, reflections, or memories. Any meaning or narrative is open to interpretation and an act of conscious engagement. I like to think I am constructing stories that both do and do not belong to any specific person, but embrace the plurality of realities and encourage us, if only for a moment, to step out of the story and into the song.