Why Pay More? Collage

I was born Sept. 20, 1983 in Dundee, Illinois.

I now live and work in Brookings, Oregon.

I am inspired primarily by nature, including politics and American culture in relation to it, and have devoted the past couple of years to making shrines and reliquaries to insects, lichens, twigs, seaweed, birds, etc...

Artist Statement:
Through appropriation, I strive to elevate and enshrine previously unnoticed and under-appreciated objects raising them above the noise and flashing lights of modernity, to a place where they can be seen and discussed as art.
I draw inspiration from the combination of science and detailed artistry involved in Victorian microscope slides; the macabre yet sentimental wonder of Victorian taxidermy displays; the random oddities preserved and housed in cabinets of curiosity, and the sense of captured time found in natural history museums.

The furnished condition is a cultural state, a change in the way we perceive ourselves, manifested in our relation to the objects around us: it consists in an inability to perceive life directly and the ensuing need to recover that lost experience from the material traces it has left behind.

-The Artificial Kingdom,
pg. 186