Artist Statement
Last update: November 15, 2023

My studio is an experimentation lab for materializing my world sense. This perspective is driven by my resistance to society’s behavioral expectations of AFAB individuals and the natural world: to be contained, quiet, small, and obedient. Building on my foundation in figuration, I merge abstract painting, sculpture, printmaking, and collage to create a multi-dimensional experience that resists categorization and breaks boundaries. Utilizing abstracted, pictorial space embedded in sculptural form, my artworks create a distortion of reality and of how I am perceived as a non-gender conforming subject. 

Creating the artworks fuses my body with manual industrial machines, while playing with the idea of the artist as an enhanced cyborg empowered to achieve feats of physical labor. This drive to fuse myself with machines in a sculptural manner in part comes from my decade-long experiences in painting fabrication, during which time I was essentially a human printer. By becoming a machinist, I am able to bypass some of these labor systems. Yet, the act of bending metal takes a substantial effort that transforms my own body in the process.

There is also a performative, physical effort in bending and cutting the sculptures. After water jet and band saw cutting, I clamp the sheet metal to the table or insert it into a manual brake. Then, I bend it with all of my body’s strength followed by filing edges and welding contact points. After, I collage high key colored prints (for indoor works) or paint directly onto the metal surfaces (for outdoor works) to quickly stimulate the viewer’s retina and challenge their perceptions of edge and color. These vibrant prints derive from gesturally scanning and warping my physical paintings. As a result, my art represents a fusion of traditional and innovative painting, blending human touch with mechanized precision. These tools help enlarge my paintings in order to expand beyond the limits of my own physicality and therefore occupy space through sculptural form.

My abstract sculptural creations are an affinity for the non-human, including metal shop tools, malleable steel, and wild animals – such as mammals, amphibians, insects, and mollusks – that inspire my forms and patterned colorations. While expressing solidarity with the environment and ecofeminist discourses, I see the recyclable steel sculptures as the embodiment of abstracted bodies hybridized with these powerful, stealthful, courageous animals. I aspire to materially balance both intutive and structured energy, playfulness and gravitas, expression and analysis. As a result, my artworks exist as “glitches'' within the physical space that challenge the viewer’s perceptions of space, color, and form while defying gender expectations and the status quo of the flat rectangle.