Artist Statement

My artwork combines ink line drawing and oil painting on unprimed wood surfaces. I paint on off-cut wood because each piece possesses its own distinct composition that offers unanticipated challenges in the process of both drawing and painting. Unlike traditional paper, canvas, or digital space, scrap wood has no standard, blank white default setting. The human body has the same experience as wood, it never exists as a neutral, static object without context. Both are always aged and dynamically aging, rich with unique imperfections, random dimensions, and unexpected varieties of sizes, shapes, colors, and textures.

I try to capture the human body in motion rather than centering proportion, perspective, or likeness, because human viewers are capable of reacting across language and cultural barriers and beyond their own conscious minds in recognizing themselves in another kindred form or idea. I most frequently center queer people of color, indigenous and nomadic traditions, folklore, and diaspora in my artwork because the known and perpetuated social conventions, cultural norms, and institutions throughout most histories in most places are monolithic and exclusive by intent or inaccessible by default to people like us who happen to exist in the margins of the margins and experience the intersections of compounding oppression and invisibility.