My work draws from sources as varied as the materials I use. Ideas often cycle though a variety of sources to amass their form-beginning with an extant work of art, traveling through a book, stumbling into a building, and listening to some tunes along the way. From the ancients to the new, I utilize the sacred rituals of creation and destruction that allow the cult of the hand to grasp the found object and transform both.
I am a scavenger - accumulating materials from waste generated at a restaurant, the streets of Brooklyn, even inside my studio, taking the “failed” paintings of my studiomate and my own sculptural debris to repurpose. My process can combine three sculptures into one or conversely, one piece could splinter into two, as mutations of success and failure compete for formal equilibrium. I consider painting both an activity and a material, a surface possibility in three dimensions. Often the faces of my work are scraped and repainted many times over, gradually accumulating their skin. The patina created on many surfaces acts as a record of both time’s passage and the improvisational nature of my studio practice, revealing the the distance traveled and decisions made to reach the destination.
I respect the sacredness of ritual embrace the beauty and horror of the unplanned. In the end, the work is a response to and digestion of itself, an exploratory surgery. It is a physical article documenting an attempt to join the maker and the made, the being and the material. My work is a record of a conversation- sometimes an argument- with my materials, which must be resolved through building and listening as the forms learn to speak. the conversation may have begun in South American Literature and ended up with Mesopotamian Ziggurats, but the points between are all evident, if one cares to closely inspect.