Spotlight: Oh the Places We Will Go

Artist Statement

Oh the Places We Will Go

Our world is constantly being reloaded with data, images, opportunities, options for reinterpretation, and fleeting impressions. In a continuously evolving world, the paintings in this series of work act as a snapshot of this maelstrom of information overload and show a scene apparently caught in limbo between reality and a dream. By using the everyday as a departure point to escape into abstraction, I am able to create a world where thoughts and a physical reality are concurrently at odds and interconnected. In blurring the bounds of figuration, the everyday, and abstraction, I create claustrophobic compositions that hint at the internal space of a dream, thought, memory, or fantasy. The emotional stock of my abstractions is in constant flux, seeming to denote feelings of the flesh, form, nature, machine, energy, architecture, good/evil, sex, life/death, etc. Rules are being broken, bent, and ultimately distorted to meet my needs of creating a space that buzzes, vibrates, compresses, expands, and feels charged with the energy of a changing environment. Time in these images could be a fleeting memory or seconds away from becoming reality; the specifics are not important. I am interested in creating paintings that challenge our perception of a realistic time and place.

The work is first a response to the world, and then a reaction to what it has to offer. With these paintings, I want to use personal narrative as a means of composing, but it is important to know that they are only a starting point for a composition of destruction and the ecstatic within nature, life, and memory.