Artist Statement
I took a walk on the night that the downpour stopped
And by the river caught a glimpse of sequined sidewalks.
But the sequins writhed and struggled to breathe-
Countless fish deserted on the drying concrete.
At that moment the world was white noise.
What I perceived as order was actually chaos. The civil and rational daily life mocks reality with its artificial skin. Appearances of respectability, philosophy, and religion are used to gloss over our internal impulses. But how long can those be repressed? Courtesies seem to manipulate our emotions and dull them down into something acceptable.
How an individual fits into the world and what relationships exist between that individual and another are the concepts that underlie my work. Literature has been influential because at a young age I stumbled upon its possession of humanity’s secrets.
With the belief that I had simply never learned the elementary principles of relations, I turned to psychology. The idea of something underneath and hidden sprang from Freud’s belief of the id as something primeval with instinctual drives.
But if in truth we are instinctual, unorganized, and irrational, where will we go? Façades cannot be maintained forever. And while the majority can yield to what society deems reasonable, some skins, not as thick with deceit, may evolve to show what reality truly is.
I use what humiliates and scares me about myself, because personal and private imagery can evoke universal emotions. Playing with the idea that what we physically see is “truth,” I try to fabricate reality and change it subtly to show the unreality within it. I want to emphasize the irony in society and question where the individual belongs in such a mechanical world of indifference. The use of the portrait and certain recognizable materials are intended to “clothe” abstract emotions and instinctual urges in some sort of graspable form.

