Artist Statement

In recent work, I have been exploring postmodern approaches to ontological concerns of human struggle and endeavor.  Through fragmentation, reconstruction, and the use of scientific and technical imagery, I examine our attempts at navigating, overcoming, and making sense of our experiences.  In this way, scientific imagery becomes a metaphor—the images of arranging, probing beneath, taking apart, and reassembling represent our investigating, organizing, and interpreting human experience.

Instructional diagrams, like those used when assembling furniture, lend themselves to this metaphor in that there is often a disparity between what is expected and what actually occurs.  Similarly, scientific drawings of cross-sections of flesh convey a contrived and artificial expression of what, in reality, is neither contained nor orderly.  In the Cube of Flesh series, I exaggerated this quality by turning the diagrams into prettified still-life objects in a three-dimensional space.  Some of them even appear like pastries, further underscoring the absurdity of the contrived orderliness they embody.

Multiple panels, segments, and layers often play a role in my work.  This fragmentation and layering resonates with a disjunctive and complex struggle of negotiating one’s experiences in a postmodern environment.  A postmodern view dispels the simplified & teleological order of our surroundings to describe a denser perspective in which the world is increasingly more complicated.  Not only is information presented to us in an incohesive fashion, but also how we solve problems and perceive the world depends on a disparate and layered framework of multiple variables and multiple disciplines, thus complicating our ability to navigate and make sense of our environment.

Stitching, tying, separating, and reassembling act as metaphors of the process of reconstructing disparate and contradictory experiences into new narratives or interpretations.  I believe that we attempt to make sense of our experiences by turning them into internal stories in which we investigate, rearrange, and reassemble the disorder and contradictions of our experiences.  Most likely, it is the act of reconstructing that allows us, for the time being, to struggle, navigate, and overcome.