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Studying distance and control within human-human relationships and the power dynamics therein is necessary if artmaking is to fully inhabit its metamorphic potential—not that art can "change the world," but that the world we wish to see exists in a virtual state, and art is a medium one can utilize to negotiate with the other actors needed to actualize it. Therefore, my work spotlights and upends the pillars of relationship and difficulty. I am interested in the spaces where order and obscenity are negotiated, what Lewis Hyde calls “dirt-work.” Difficult art is dirt-work. I consider it my responsibility to create work that inspires—perhaps requires—these negotiations. 

 

Relationship, order, and obscenity iterate differently across my media choices. My 2D work is often figurative and focuses on ambiguity: what is violence, love, consent? Why is it that these things so often look like one another?  I am particularly interested in the intersection of queer identity, perversion, and political resistance. Through my figurative work, I question how these emotions and experiences often overlap, using materials and mark-making to convey affect and bodily intensity. I draw on Francis Bacon’s “brutality of fact” and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, emphasizing an unflinching approach to materiality and form that mirrors the complexities of the body and lived experience.  

 

In my 4D work, I focus primarily on the confrontation of hypocrisy and the notion of accumulation: of events, of marks, of interventions. This is true in pieces like “accumulation: focet (sic)” and “Telling the Future Through a Portal,” where the former questions how small traumas build to large ones and the latter sees spit from a great height as climate anxiety. Saliva is a material I return to in all my work, and I use it as a multifaceted metaphor for relationship and queerness, especially in this era of trans panic and pandemic. Performance underlines that relationship is not something “arrived” at: like Erich Fromm’s definition of love, it is a constant practice.