Artist Statement

The work here is based on instinct, an instinct I have developed by seeing art. It is a pure abstraction of my thought or lack of thought, the blankness of mind, a meditation. Because I grew up very poor, I became accustomed to creating art using whatever I could find. I work predominantly with mundane materials such as canvas drop cloth, house paint, oil enamel, concrete, tar, clay, etc. because they were the things I had access to, the things we all have access to. Those materials connect me to my past and still give me comfort. I wasn't introduced to art via academia but from trips my mom and I would take to Kansas City where we experienced the entirety of the city—the beauty within the museum and the grit of the street. I eventually discovered graffiti and fell in love with hip-hop culture; it gave me an escape and sense of community, somewhere you could exist without existing.

This new perspective taught me to see things differently. I started noticing walls, the erosion in and of cities which has become a huge inspiration to my work. I create my work because I don’t have any other choice, it is an addiction. I rarely have any sort of plan; I react to the music I put on, to the surface, to the lines or splotches of color, to the materials I have at hand. Working with these common, non-archival materials, I aim to create works that breakdown over time like our bodies or the walls in a city. I’m not trying to convey any specific meaning in my work; there is no political or philosophical metaphor in these layers. These works exist because of what has happened and what happens, something that will always be with me and a place I can always escape to. They are all self-portraits, every bit of me.

-“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”