Paintings

Works on Paper

ARTIST STATEMENT:
Where my real life anxieties, phobias, and compulsions are acted out in dream scenarios is where I find my most inspiration. My drawings are illustrations of mental narratives (usually played out in dreams), fueled by anxiety. The overlap between fiction and reality within my dream narratives has stimulated the subject matter, spatial arrangements, and visual vocabulary in my art. Its piecemeal composition of life's everyday elements serves as a doorway to my own subconscious, and I often find myself attempting to decipher its unsettling latent message through drawing.

Therein lies the purpose of my work-to poke at the subconscious fears and secret puzzlement of my surroundings, particularly what is unfamiliar to me and what I cannot pretend to understand. My work is not an exploration of cultural relativism. It is as judgmental, exoticizing, and perhaps even moralistic as I am. However, in its unfashionable view of the other from my own perspective, it begs the perspective of the very other I exoticize.

In order to communicate multiple viewpoints and my own personal sense of time collapse, I have borrowed heavily from ancient Chinese landscape painting and children’s book illustrations. Space is manipulated so that opposing perspectives are juxtaposed against one another on the same plane. Likewise, two or more scenarios may play out on the same page, side by side. Their location on the page often signifies that the two events occurred at different times, or two events occur at the same time in different places. My experimentation with time and space distortion on a two dimensional plane has found new life in simple animation, which offers room for more complexity in my storytelling.