statement

Building on the work of historic painters like Rachel Ruysch, Jan de Heem, and Jan van Huysum, my work uses the Dutch Baroque as a mirror for the contemporary United States. The visual language I currently favor is informed both by art historical works and contemporary painters, including Catherine Murphy, Ellen Altfest and Simon Ling.

In his book, "Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting," Norman Bryson touches on one way in which still life, through the use of hyper-attention, holds together two opposing tendencies. He suggests that this is done by balancing the social meaning of a given object against a painter's tendency to obsessively work through a vision of the particular object, defamiliarizing it and puling it out of context (p 89). My work intends to create such a disconnect from everyday ways of seeing. I hope that, following from Bryson's theory, this piece will provoke the viewer to have a fresh encounter with everyday objects.

bio

born: 1980, Rockford, Illinois

education

University of Notre Dame, BA, 2002

Cornell University, incomplete graduate studies in anthropology 2004-2006

University of Washington, MFA, 2015 (projected)

selected publications

Davis, Rodney. The Modern Vanitas, 2014

selected group shows

Off the Grid: Summer Works,  Sand Point Gallery, University of Washington, 2014

1st Year MFA Show, Jacob Lawrence Art Gallery, University of Washington, 2014

Small Things, Haynes Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee, 2012

Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Mall Galleries, London, England, 2011