artist statement
I am an artist, designer and DJ living and working in Oakland. Trained as an architect, but a painter at heart, I have embraced collage as a medium which spans these worlds.
I envision the city around me as a continuously evolving collage. The urban fabric is in an unending process of transformation, shaped over time through layering, aggregation, erasure, cutting and splicing. It expands and contracts through a connective structure that allows disparate elements, characters and conditions to interact with one another. I incorporate these same processes of city-making into my art practice through a language of architectonic abstraction. The resultant collages are future urban landscapes - derived from the cities of my memory, experience and imagination.
Using the scraps, maps, magazines and memorabilia that I gather in my travels and accumulate in my studio, I dismantle then reassemble fragments of the city into new and unexpected relationships. The interlocking forms and surreal juxtapositions of my collages blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, organic and man-made, growth and decay, earth and sky. I avoid fixed points of view or scenic specificity, instead opting for fragmented perspectives, scalar distortions and impossible vistas. Above all, I strive for a sense of motion and depth that encourages the viewer to reexamine their own role as a participant in the creation of urban space.
In my recent series, I explore apocalyptic oil-drenched landscapes, the decay of the post-industrial city, the miracles of modern technology, and extra-terrestrial adventurism. These abstract - yet distinctly spatial - compositions are consistently rooted in the cities I have inhabited - from Boston to Philly to Oakland, and abroad to Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona and beyond. However, these collages do not represent any singular place but rather the themes that have traveled with me throughout my growth as an artist, a designer, and a city-dweller.
Machine Language is a further exploration of how collage can capture the products and processes of city-making. My latest series takes a more focused and localized approach to the city than its predecessors. All the collage images are sourced from prints of black and white photos I have taken in and around Oakland. I have dismantled images of urban infrastructure and reassembled them into a group of six unique machines. These alien machines devour the urban fabric and incorporate its contents into their intricate yet monstrous bodies. These new works will be shown alongside my previous series, Space/Shift and enGulfed. Together, these collages comprise a grand narrative about the future of our cities and the challenges they face.