PORTRAITS & FIGURES
LANDSCAPE, PLACE & MEMORY
Works constructed from objects and images that have already lived another life. Collectibles, commercial ephemera, printed fragments, and cultural artifacts are cut, buried, painted over, and reassembled—shifting them from one economy of value into another. What was once preserved, traded, consumed, or discarded becomes material for revision.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with mixed media, portraiture, and found commercial ephemera to examine concealment, revision, and the unstable construction of cultural memory. I am drawn to surfaces that have already lived in the world—postage stamps, trading cards, manuals, packaging, printed fragments, and other worn materials—because they arrive carrying the residue of circulation, desire, nostalgia, and use. Collectible, disposable, intimate, mass-produced, sentimental, commercial: I treat these objects as charged archives.
Through layering, masking, abrasion, collage, and overworking, I alter familiar surfaces until they begin to occupy an uncertain territory between artifact and image, relic and commodity, portrait and disguise. The process is driven by an impulse to revise what appears ordinary, damaged, or culturally overfamiliar, but also by an awareness that repair can become concealment. The work asks what is preserved, what is obscured, and what is rewritten when fractured surfaces are made to carry new meaning.
Pop culture occupies an important place in this language. I am interested in its ability to function simultaneously as fantasy, comfort, mythology, escape, and a kind of secular devotion. Icons, collectibles, and nostalgic imagery become vessels for longing and self-fashioning, but they also carry histories of commerce, status, and cultural value. I do not simply quote these images; I stress them, bury them, embellish them, and reassemble them until their familiar meanings begin to shift.
In some works, I incorporate authentic collectible and commercial artifacts rather than reproductions. Their prior lives matter. These objects have already been handled, desired, circulated, protected, traded, and assigned value. Altering them moves them from one economy into another—from collectible relic to art object, from preserved commodity to reworked cultural memory. The intervention is intentionally charged: an act of both reverence and disruption.
At its core, my practice considers how beauty, accumulation, and labor can operate as acts of care while also becoming forms of masking. I return to the handmade intervention as a way of confronting the friction between personal memory and mass culture, historical weight and visual seduction, reverence and ruin. Surface becomes more than decoration; it becomes a contested site where memory is edited, identity is staged, and cultural debris is asked to speak.