Artist Statement

I believe that art has the ability to change one’s perspective of (the way one sees) the everyday world.  Whether this is done through extreme imagination or faithful representation, ultimately art derives its power from being a potent personal vision.  I have cultivated my own personal vision through transforming physical interactions with common environments into visual pictures.  Rather than taking a photo or drawing from life at a distance, I start my drawings in extreme proximity to my inspiration, literally placing my paper on the ground and rubbing over it with my pencil.  Taking this physical interaction as the starting point for giant landscape drawings allows me to approach an extremely familiar environment, the urban street, with fresh eyes.  Though the appearance of my work fluctuates between representation and abstraction, I consider myself a “realist” because I am interested in maintaining some truth to physical reality.

This connection to the everyday world is of the utmost importance to my art practice.  I am fascinated by the physical structures of human civilization, ranging from the hidden structures that lie beneath the ground in the form of sewer systems and gas lines, to exposed systems of power lines and water pipes.  This collection of structures is essential to the existence of the current human population, it is a reflection of society, and, though not permanent, it has a life span greater than that of the people who constructed it.  In other words, these structures are put in place by humans but quickly take on a life of their own; for example, weeds take root in the pavement, creating fissures (an act of destruction), while simultaneously creating entirely new ecosystems.  As a former student of International Development and someone who has chosen to live, study, and work in locations as diverse as Costa Rica, India, and a small town in Canada, I have spent considerable time exploring this basic physical infrastructure in a multitude of forms.

While my National Landscape and Washington Monument series’ pushed the idea of physical interaction with the environment only to the extent of walking, photographing, and on-site drawing, the idea of physicality is more manifest in my most recent work.  These immense drawings are direct translations of the rubbings I create outside, including vacancies created by the folding the source paper around three dimensional street curbs and other objects.  While in the source material I am exploring physical, rather than visual, ways of collapsing three-dimensional space into two dimensions, this idea is further complicated in the finished drawings, in which ambiguous scale shifts cause the works to shift between macrocosm and microcosm, as well as aerial and renaissance perspective.  These deep examinations of common structures reveal pictures whose elements are never quite what they seem: forms border on becoming formless, structures feel like they’re about to fall apart, “natural” elements don’t quite feel “natural.”  The millions of tiny, layered marks that build up the mass of the drawings threaten to reconfigure themselves at any moment, leaving an uncertainty as to whether they are caught in an instant immediately before their dissolution or resolution.  This parallels the urban landscape, an environment whose components are slowly crumbling under the pressure of civilization while simultaneously taking on a life of their own beyond their originally intended human purpose.  In this way, my drawings expose a fragile beauty and complexity inherent in the urban landscape that might otherwise go unnoticed.