Artist Statement

I paint because art visualizes ideas in ways that words or data cannot. My earliest influences were muralists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Seeing Rivera’s La Gran Tenochtitlan as a teenager visiting Mexico City taught me the power of art to tell stories.

My work is shaped by a lifetime of experience living and working in systems and settings where authority often went unquestioned. Through painting, I revisit those systems to reveal what they obscure or deflect. Born and raised in Chicago, I have witnessed both the human cost of state violence and the ideologies that normalize them. My paintings often try to unravel that normalization, not by being proscriptive or preachy, but describing systems I cannot accept and the collectives working to dismantle them.

I work in a variety of mediums but pivoted largely to oil paint whose slow drying times enable me to work on three or four series at a time. My process begins digitally, within the minimalist interface of R-Studio. I treat its plot window as a blank canvas, coding geospatial maps and abstract scatterplots to generate unique visual forms. I transpose these visual forms onto canvas or wood panel through projection, stenciling, or layered mark-making. Paintings like Panel 05 or Color Logics originated from plots I produced in R-studio. Other paintings, like my Encrypted Message series, did not. Whether grounded in data or lived experience, each painting gives form to quiet but powerful forms of suppression and resistance.