Artist Statement
I make art as a way to understand time and routine, and conflict and resolution. I draw to explore how much control we really have, over our lives and our environment. As an artist, I’m interested in this polarity—of the ways I exert myself on the world, and the ways in which the world pushes back.
I believe that each person’s brain has a fixed amount of space allotted for problems. Those with much on their mind squeeze these concerns in so as to shrink them in size, while those with relatively few struggles allow what little there is to occupy the entire area, aggrandizing their troubles. My compositions, whether populated by many bodies or a single figure, occupy space in a similar way. They are compressed into the picture plane while also threatening—but never quite managing—to burst free from it. Humans also fill this fixed amount of brain space with work for the sake of work—we gain comfort from preoccupation with even mundane endeavors. But there is always the inevitable disillusionment, and accompanying anxiety, which follows when one realizes one has been using enterprises as avoidance.
My work explores these themes by depicting Sisyphean figures engaged in taxing or seemingly impossible activities, while exposing the pointlessness of these exploits, whether undertaken individually or antagonistically with, and against, others.