TRANSITION AND RUPTURE

A metamorph draws your eye only by its insistence on change. To stabilize, to find locus in bodily permanency, is to die. Survival with maturation demands the shattering of form and the amalgamation of past identities. The moment of division occurs, and one body becomes itself and another. My artwork is centered on the unique human capacity for manipulating bodily evolution, referencing themes of connection, mutation, miscegenation, and ephemerality.

Human fascination with the grotesque other, the body that is both beautiful in its emergent development and absurdly preternatural, is a major area of my creative scrutiny. Within my work, aberrant bodies float, tubes link and twist, and structures divide. In one's obsessive quest for physical regulation, often through the interference of medicine and technology, the human body subsists in a state of impermanence and transition, bustling to action, craving longevity, yet unable to predict the results of mediated transfiguration. Exploring the unknown progeny becomes my artistic motivation.

My art is an attempt to relate to a modern sense of physical displacement, and by extension, an effort to recall the deep-seated inner vitality that separates one being from the next. I am keenly aware of the need to restate individual nature within a world that places emphasis on hi-tech or mechanical efficiency and increasing multiplicity of homogenized form. Artwork, in all of its forms, has been, and will continue to be, my anchor to those qualities that reference the hand-made, the original, and the sacred. Through the mantra of painting and drawing, I make reference to the limitations, flaws, obsessions, and aspirations of my own body, as well as my conviction in self-reliance.

Above all, I am interested in the effects of corporeal malleability and technological dependence as they relate to bodily identity. Dominant themes include preservation versus transience, control versus metastasis, and unity versus fragmentation. The periphery demands attention, and I respond: What is the shape of rupture?

 

born: 1980, Cleveland, Ohio

education

Ohio University, MFA, 2007
Marietta College, BA, 2002