A scream can be a yawn…or a body can be a vessel…if only we start by squinting. When the edges blur, I start to wonder how many times has a script played out before, in a slightly different tune? What does it mean for me to put all those tunes together and try to create some form of (dis)harmony?  At its core, my practice embraces the multiplicity of the abject. We often oversimplify thoughts, feelings, and ideas to avoid the grotesque. But, death, discomfort, slime, and ooze is in all of us, the same way that beauty can be. 

Humanity’s relationship with the body, the brain, and the metaphysical self, ricochets back and forth from humorous to torturous.  Stendahl posed the idea of “what eye can see itself?” Deleuze took it a step further by saying, “painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs....” Those indirect conversations are a mixture of fluids pooling from the lineage of time. I hock a loogie into it too, by synthesizing my own feelings and eyeballs with artists like Bruegel, Goya, Ensor, and Munch. There’s an alchemy in zipping different dichotomies (materially, emotionally, stylistically) together to go somewhere new. When I’m feeling unsure, about the world, about myself, about my art, there’s always another image to uncover that’s singing a similar tune of unease to help guide the way through.