ARTIST STATEMENT

World-building is the heart of my practice. This is a fact not only of the work itself, iconography and symbology employed as language of narrative, endogenous expressions of a multitude of facts and facets of our contemporary socio-culture, but a style born out of experiential challenges in worldly socio-culture itself. 

 

Having evolved work from foundational abstraction after relocating to Ningbo, China in 2016,  works characteristic of its basic tenets of geometry and gesture, I found my connection to art-making was in the communication of its ideas more than its objecthood; however, after my first solo show in 2018, I found that the communication of ideas I sought was stuck in the supplementary vehicles of its delivery: Language. 

 

The more I wanted to express, the more I found myself disconnected. My literacy in China was poor. The language gap being my prime challenge, given my days were spent communicating predominately in English, teaching at an American high school and a Chinese University in it, I found myself adapting communications, reverting to modes of expression most simple, even primal: Pictorial gestures. 

 

Having been inundated with Chinese symbolic language at every turn, learning their meanings via pictorial devices, I realized I could do the same to communicate the themes I was most interested in expressing, so naturally I began an intuitive mark-making process that sought a symbology of universality: Faces in isolation to express themes of mental health disenfranchisement, enclosed bars to represent forms of socio-political oppression, cubes with antennae coupling media impact, for example. 

 

I was finding symbolic universalities, not unlike those embedded in Chinese written language, that transcended our gaps, vocabulary that has continued to expand a world of my own today where I make mixed media paintings, mostly with acrylics and pastels, using personalized iconography and child-like characters to express narratives of contemporary modes of human-geography and socialization.