Artist Statement

My work forms a kind of diary throughout a specific period of time, difficult or calm. They are “memoirs of disintegration”, but they are also a record of recovery and reconstruction after disintegration. My work is motivated by secret thoughts and private experience, some trite and banal, some complex and glorious, but all of it obsessively recorded. The secret things are the most difficult for the artist and the viewer. Perhaps, for this reason, the investigation is most rewarding.

The implicit secrecy of diary-type projects brings about an additional complication to the question “What is this work about?” Both literary and visual diaries are the result of a kind of compulsion. The urge to record, in some form, is so overpowering and the desperation to “get it on paper” so conspicuous, that one may justifiably ask if the work is even intended for a viewer to decipher. Like much autobiographical work, a visual diary can transform private experiences in a manner that is relevant for both author and viewer.

My work is often deceptively simple, with linear, near-universal forms such as circles, ellipses, vessels, and leaves, as well as some forms posing as hieroglyphics. Arranged in sequences like the syntax of a secret language, or the poetic notations of an autistic architect, they appear amid vaporous mists of color. Together they comprise something like a dream, or maybe the schematic of a dream. In my work, seemingly random forms are actually engaged in a dialog with each other and also with the viewer. Their placement is conversational, where they can only be deciphered through imagination.

I use these symbols as a means to search for an order, but not an order with specific systems and constraints. I look for an order that is true to depicting the experience. There is a systematic space in my work, but at the same time, an uncertainty within the space. The use of lines and planes accomplish this uncertainty; this type of framework depletes the very inference of the structure. I want no measurable point related to these forms. Instead, they indicate constant flux. It is my ultimate goal to create a work of art that is not beautiful, but something that remains as a true experience as felt.