Artist Statement No. 1 (shorter version)

I use paintings because they allow me to deploy seemingly opposing strategies simultaneously. We are persistently forced to negotiate between our very human predisposition towards transcendent meaning and the fabricated materiality of the world at large. Similarly, my paintings situate themselves at a point of confliction—between the impressionability of atmospheric abstraction and a state of rigid representation. I am interested in paintings being able to operate both as static windows of idiosyncratic difference and as pieces of capital, subject to intense mobility

My choice to engage this middle-ground—to play both ‘sides’—is not driven by apathy but active ambivalence, a desire for the paintings to alternately be able to foster a meditative encounter and submit to contingency. This oscillation relies not solely on the make-up of the paintings, but also on the context in which they are situated. By emphasizing the relative nature of the work and its reception, I would like to point towards the relative nature of our reception of the world in general. I want the works to be emptied out or full of information or both. They are pregnant, not yet birthing—absent in their presence.

The display strategies I utilize illustrate contingency and reiterate the flexibility (or vulnerability) I have built into the paintings. I think of this flexibility as being metaphorically related to how we, as individuals, shift our personalities and levels of engagement in order to cope with the world at large.