High and Free Collage

I make thoughtful mixed-media works that mediate friction between narrative and materiality. Novelistic pastiche and intuitive abstract painting confront each other in a bricolage of photographs, paint, and found objects. From a trace discovered in a few abject elements at the beginning of my process, I interweave strata, adding and subtracting components strategically or intuitively to create a quirky grammar of intellect and wonder. While my development has been steadily nourished by great mixed-media artists of the past, including Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg and the Kienholzes, I'm also inspired by contemporaries like Fred Tomaselli, Julian Schnabel and Barnaby Furnas. Due to a lifelong visual impairment, I have access to the Library of Congress audio collection; the books I listen to while painting frequently inform my work. I think of my pieces as contemporary equivalents to religious icons, memory gardens or totem poles; abstracted story-boards in which the gaze explores systems of interpretation and meaning in a shared situation with the artwork. My practice seizes the narrative debris of Spectacle - advertisements with their flattened affect, litter, hyper-real media images, plastic paint - and humanizes them in matrices of personal symbolism. I strive to push the narrative element as far as it can go in materiality and, beyond merely illustrating, signify stories infused with broad, universal themes and questions.