My paintings and drawings express my overarching interest in entropy, the universal tendency toward chaos and disorder, and forces of turbulence, disruption within flow and velocity. While these concepts naturally align with scientific investigation, I am interested in how they manifest in our technology, culture and stories. Entropy and turbulence are continually present in our collective histories, narratives and discoveries. My work isolates disruptions at varying levels to explore its nature as artifact, the material and methods of its expression and our symbolic language codifying it.
As a tangible entry point to these concepts, I rework the media of the comic book, with research based in my childhood collection of 1980-90s comic books. Through the lens of the super powered characters , the comics explore the human condition and societal issues forming modern-day myths. As with all myths, archetypes, challenges and consequences are present. Removing the heroes and villains leaves the aftermath of conflicts as a point of focus in the work. I collect and collage an array of random images combined with many of my own imagined objects. Many of these images depict destroyed spaces, collisions, explosions, debris fields and architectural remains. The result is a familiar space that has ruptured and dissolved into an entropic metaphysical landscape. These paintings and drawings map the tumult of our time and our fractured relationship to the natural world.
Foregoing traditional conventions of realistic space, objects in dramatic perspective interplay with jungle foliage and eruption clouds. Symbolic representations of concussive force and black outlines are the vocabulary used to frame out these compositions. These detached visual artifacts, and their traces of larger narratives, serve as building blocks for new ideas. The new arrangement is arrived at by intuitive and formal juxtapositions with no direct intention. In this way, a subconscious approach, the reoccurring cataclysmic archetypes of our myths and storytelling can be explored.
This series of graphic and highly saturated colors work challenges the dominance of linear sequence in narrative and underscores the connection between popular narrative forms, like comic books, to larger histories of narrative painting. Much of the theory behind the work originates in film and media studies. Inspirational to these works are my experiences encountering aftermath- fossil hunting along the shores of Seneca Lake and Pre- Columbian ruins in Bolivia, my mother's home country.