Artist Statement

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 violence and the ideologies that normalize them. My paintings unravel that normalization by visualizing 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 concepts or emotions, each painting visualizes hidden forces and renders them open to interpretation.