Artist Statement

My artwork thematically questions the ethics surrounding contemporary agriculture practices, ethnobotany, and the defamiliarization felt in urban and rural modern landscapes. Centrally, I am focused on depicting both complex environmental and sociopolitical landscapes related to agriculture and gastronomy. I believe that it is the nuance and multidimensionality of visual art that makes it the only language to translate such reckonings. My goal is to achieve an estranged ambivalence within my work. I aim to utilize the access that representational imagery allows by evoking ecological uncanniness as tinged with an aftertaste of droll humor, satirical in nature, echoing the current state of the world. I draw on philosophies of artists such as Gustav Klimt, whose landscapes depict nature as symbolically autonomous from the human world, and Ana Mendieta, who, in contrast, understood the body and the natural world to be extensions of each other, ecologically inextricable.

The foundation of my art practice is research analysis. There is considerable weight throughout my process on what historically archival research I come across, and how I can expand outwards to understand the broader context for which my artwork is placed within. Primarily, my artwork mediums are oil painting, watercolor, and pen-and-ink drawing, occasionally dipping into found-object and clay sculpture, installation, and basket weaving. Secondarily, such “research mediums” consist of meticulous list making, stream of consciousness writing, photographing references such as objects and scenes, reading relevant literature tied to my visual thoughts, academic articles that inform the subject matter at hand, and site-visits, in order to gain what visceral embodiment is felt through the immediacy of being physically in a place, or in front of a work of art. Overall, my process sometimes consists of looser experimental painting and drawing studies, and sometimes involves thorough background research aiming to scrutinize the subject at hand. The process of making studies is critical to organize my thoughts and writing into physical realizations. Such studies are interrelated bits and pieces and develop into a final, realized painting.