Artist Statement

My impetus is rooted in my educational background. Despite achieving decent grades, I struggled to process much of the standardized information, crucial to my future, beyond the test. I felt alone until I got my first real job out of college and realized how unsupported many people feel when trying to reach a career or just retain information for a career. "It's called getting experience", I was told, yet there's a difference between good and bad experience. Art, I feel, is the former. Others can disagree on their own bases.

The pieces I make (or strive to make) are a learning experience for me and the viewer. I want the viewer to be able to walk away knowing something new and acknowledge that it wasn't in the grueling method that typical education occurs. There's a place for repetition...and there's a place for the senses to guide our learning and memory of that new knowledge.

​

Herein, I don't focus on topics on which I know more than a knowledge unit: a question with some concept and/or proposition. I stumble into an idea based off of what I don't know, producing drafts of imperfect knowledge, and trusting that eventually my web of creations might reach a conclusion about a topic. This is how we learn the basics of our native tongues. If I or others find joy in the visual and it creates good, sound conversation about the topic, I know I did a good job in learning the topic itself and how to present it artistically.

Media may work with or against the topic or concept and I will learn this in the result. I have to learn how the media reacts with my topic and how collective sense-making will react to their combination. Nine out of 10 times, I expect a failure. That's how science is and art is a science.

​

As I stumble to process this knowledge using my senses, my strongest tools, to retain the material and portray it accurately, my ultimate goal is to positively influence pedagogy.

​