ARTIST’S STATEMENT

All of my work comes from my daily practice of walking through the city. As I walk, I observe my surroundings and intentionally look for ways to blur the boundaries between what I think about as urban and natural, masculine and feminine, fixed and ephemeral, bordered and free. 

Almost everything I create in the studio begins as dream-like paintings and collaged photographs of the city in the pages of discarded books I find on my walks.

Some of these books become an archive of the various shapes sunlight makes as it reflects off windows onto buildings and sidewalks–luminous forms I call Sun Glyphs and imagine as a secret system of hieroglyphic light language hiding in plain sight in the urban landscape.

Another book–a tall photographic monograph about skyscrapers–has become the source material for my Sentinels portrait series, which uses mixed media collage to transforms iconic towering buildings into the bodies of women and non binary people in my community whose leadership is grounded in collective liberation and stands in direct tension with the city skyline’s celebration of hierarchical power dynamics.

A third group of books is called Tiny Portals and holds my loosest and most abstract work–vivid gouache paintings and mixed media sketches that I summon from the in-between state I enter on my walks when the mundane seems to give way to the mystical. 

Using the images from these books as source material, I create works in a range of materials–totemic digital prints on canvas that I paint, collage and stitch into; image transfers on antique glass; assemblages that combine photographic prints with paint, fiber, and objects found while walking; lumen prints mounted on plexiglass or printed on polysilk to be waved as flags; polyhedral dice collaged with images and designed to be thrown in divination rituals.

Throughout all of these pieces there is a thread of spiritual devotion and a quiet but insistent pulse of the erotic–a search for codes, practices and rituals that can unhook me from the frenetic pace and rigid disembodiment of city life and reconnect me to a more resonant, sensual experience of time, light, and the body.

These ways of working pay homage to ancient practices of tracking time by observing cycles of sunlight against megalithic structures like Stonehenge, Chichen Itzá, and the Egyptian pyramids, while also nodding to contemporary light-based land art explorations like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. 

I often invite other people into this work with me, drawing on my background in theater and performance to collaborate with singers, actors, writers, and activists to create multidisciplinary rituals and spaces for reflection and connection.