Hello FreshArts!

I'm the current 2019-20 Bryan Artist in Residence, for the The Arts Council of Brazos Valley. Here in Brya Texas I'm seeking opportunities in the visual arts for painting commissions, digital art freelance, and collaborations. As a former resident of the pacific northwest, I earned a BA in visual arts at Evergreen State College and completed my MFA in visual studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. I am currently immersed in full-time studio art practice, fulfilling the final months of my participation in the 2019-2020 Bryan Artist in Residency Program. Selections of my recent work were published in the April 2020 print and web issue of ​Operative Neurosurgery​—an academic journal produced by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and published by the Oxford University Press. Throughout 2020 I’ll be seeking programs where science and art collaborate as I am looking to steer my art practice towards a more specific collaboration with the environmental sciences.

Artist Statement:

Abstract painting, poetic writing, digital animation, and found-object sculpture are the primary mediums that I work in. As visual, verbal, and physical modes of expression, I use them to explore how imagination, interpretation, and improvisation each play roles in the making and viewing of biomorphic art. Through lenses of science fiction, biomorphic ambiguity, and whimsical humor, my work can be understood simply as the artificial cultivation and study of nonexistent organisms. By borrowing from the languages of microbiology, geology, botany, and physiology, I describe the form and function of biomorphism as if it were a specimen of science.

My work reads like a terrarium—densely populated with orbicular and curvilinear forms, it appears to throb with a kind of squelching effervescence, squirming with restless oscillation and omnidirectional scuttling. Working in layers allows me to generate granular crusts and pigment clusters that appear to mimic geological sediments, strata, striations, and other structural features found in rock formations ​and ore​ mineral deposits. Similarly, an abundance of capsules and pellet-shaped forms simulate unicellular organisms and microbial bacteria, while bulbs, flaps, and husks harken to botanical growths and plant cell enclosures. I explore the capacity for color to provide context to the work in that the dominant chromatic hues are made to correspond with a specific habitat or ecosystem, for instance tinted phthalocyanine blues can connote an aquatic setting ranging from coral reefs to glacial biomes, earthly umbers can speak to soil samples, cavernous voids, and similar subterranean spaces, whereas burnt sienna scumbles can evoke sensations of the flesh and mammalian dermal tissue.