Artist Statement

In an age of perpetual war, natural disasters, and widespread existential dread, I attempt to create spaces where myth and the supernatural contend with current realities in an often tragi-comic playfulness. I am interested in the human response to the enigmatic havoc wrought by chaos and the anxieties at the root of ritual, mythology, consumerism, and technological progress. Otherworldly narratives and cultural folklore serve as mediums with which to engage the unpredictable, uncontrollable, and uncontainable and wrestle with a collective angst. The paintings embrace a return to both the body and to nature, signaling a confidence in the inevitable recalibration of the environment over time.

According to lore, the myth of the Siren serves as a symbol of seduction, temptation, and ultimately, destruction and death. She bears the responsibility for what is as unpredictable as the weather and human frailty in the face of nature. Most commonly she is blamed for the ill fate of sailors in the event of a shipwreck, in what has historically been a way to create meaning out of chaos. Reading from a feminist hermeneutic, I attempt to re-imagine the figure of the Siren in painting as individualized instead of symbolic, overcoming these constraints of history.

Within my paintings, nature is anthropomorphized, personalizing, and animating the environment, revealing a common disposition towards the intertwined tragedy of consumerism and the ecological crisis. Plastic bags, wreckage and debris swirl around in a cesspool of post-consumer waste. These remnants of culture inhabit an imagined neo-surrealist inspired space, exposing the vacuous nature of human consumption and the endless need to fill the void with ephemeral goods that rot and decay but whose containers will outlive us all. The empty space within a single, one-use plastic bag depicted reflects the dilemma of the human condition.

The timelessness of nature and myth is the antithesis of a fleeting human existence. That which does not endure will be consumed, destroyed, and overtaken by nature once again.