2017 - 2019
They Say Hope Floats, But I’d Rather Be Sure…
My this body of work examines how a painter copes with a rapidly changing cultural and environmental landscape.
Using experimental techniques that blur the line between painting and sculpture, passive and active object, cultural artifact and survival tool, I work to examine this moment in time through the lens of art history, rising social pressures, and pseudo-disaster preparedness. My process is intentionally low-tech and jerry-rigged, indicative of how the majority of the world will haphazardly be forced to adapt.
In weaving, sewing, painting, dying, and salvaging materials, the studio becomes part wistful shrine, part research and development lab for continuous adaptations and augmentations needed for painting to survive.
30" x 40" PAINTINGS – (Dipytch) The Auroras (Aurora Borealis & Aurora Australis)
The Auroras diptych was inspired by the seminal 1865 Aurora Borealis painting by Frederic Edwin Church. Painted while the Civil War was ravaging our nation, the spectacle of Auroras were commonly understood to be a visual sign of God’s displeasure with the war.
[In Private Collection, North Carolina]
24"x18" PAINTINGS – Signals
I Wish to Communicate With You
The project includes a painting as well as performative photographic documentation of its time floating off the tip of southern Manhattan, a climate-vulnerable location. It incorporates the woven international maritime signal code for "I wish to communicate with you," as it attempts to warn us of our follies.
Acrylic and dye on handwoven canvas, found buoys, net floats, fishing identification tag, plus archival inkjet print,
30” x 40,” 2018
[University of Maryland, Public Collection]
Ode to Agnes
Acrylic, dye, bleach on handwoven canvas, found buoys, net floats, plus archival inkjet print of the painting floating off the coast of Southwest Florida.
30” x 40”, 2017
[DC Art Bank Collection, 2020]
Ode to Agnes II
Acrylic, dye, bleach on handwoven canvas, found buoys, net floats, plus archival inkjet print of the painting floating off the coast of Southwest Florida.
30” x 40”, 2017
[DC Art Bank Collection, 2020]
14" x 11" PAINTINGS – Guaranteed to Float!*
GUARANTEED TO FLOAT!* IV
Acrylic and dye on handwoven canvas, found net float, plus archival inkjet print of the painting off the coast of Southwest Florida.
16” x 28”, 2017
[Available]
In Case of Flood
acrylic and dye on handwoven canvas, found buoys, net floats, vintage child's life vest
26” x 42”, 2019
[Available]
26"x42" PAINTING – In Case of Flood
30" x 40" PAINTINGS – Fragonard Visits
The Fragonard Visits paintings were inspired by Jean Honore Fragonard’s renowned L’Escarpolette (English: The Swing), created in 1767 during the Rococo movement in France. This style, very popular in the few decades leading up to the the French Revolution, was characterized by a pastel palette and a focus on the playful, decadent, and frivolous by a governing aristocracy who were intently ignoring the warning signs of a system out of balance.