“In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening…. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried… ”

Andre Marchand quoted in “Eye and Mind” by Maurice Merleau - Ponty

Evolving out of the practice of painting, I extend painting out of it’s traditional rectangular frame and emphasize it’s plastic, synthetic and fluid nature, creating an immersive environment in which the viewer, to follow the metaphor cited by Maurice Merleau – Ponty; is in the role of the painter being penetrated by the universe.

Constructed by combining pop references, eternal currents and roughly hewn construction, the objects I create are paintings, sculptures, furniture and architectural elements simultaneously. They are assembled casually into an environment and make a domain that animates our awareness of perception and consciousness. Like props in a theatrical production, their presence stimulates actions, reactions and interactions between viewer, object and place.

In my work, I deploy a fundamental strategy of jettisoning logic by messing with scale, perspective and hierarchies of knowledge. Instead I create a fantastical landscape made from debased craft materials. The resulting pieces move between two, three and four dimensions, becoming plateaus and tables, cliffs and chairs, light, lamps and video projections.

I also play with the notion of beauty, and, specifically, beauty as a social signifier. In my work I elevate garish and childlike colors and materials such as Styrofoam, glitter, florescent paint and plastic flowers, offering an alternative kind of beauty to the tasteful materiality representative of high culture. I emphasize ornamentation rather than structure, focusing on heavily textured rather than refined surfaces. All of these strategies coalesce in merging forms that serve to- destabilize our relationship to them, to each other and to the world.

The pleasure I evoke is of the heimlich, or, homely and familiar variety. I reject the intended uses of my craft store materials and the effects they normally achieve, instead deploying them in improbable ways to yield unsuspected results, creating hybridized forms that mediate nature and artifice as well as the functional and the art object. I am not interested in the split between nature and artificiality, but interested in making spaces in which they intersect and where subjectivity and the place of the imaginary live.