BIO
I am an interdisciplinary artist who turns drawings, photos, and sculpture into installations. I have an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well as an MEd from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My work has been exhibited at the Riggs Gallery at MICA, the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, the Mitchell Gallery at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, New Jersey. I am currently an adjunct professor of art in the First Year Experience program at MICA.
I am an interdisciplinary artist who turns drawings, photos, and sculpture into installations. I have an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well as an MEd from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My work has been exhibited at the Riggs Gallery at MICA, the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, the Mitchell Gallery at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD and the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, New Jersey. I am currently an adjunct professor of art in the First Year Experience program at MICA.
STATEMENT
Drawing from my fascination with moments of change, my artwork images the transience of time by juxtaposing what was with what is. My work is interdisciplinary; I create installations that combine photography, projection, video, hand-stitched work, and drawing. My investigations can range from capturing a text read and then forgotten, to imaging present events dissolving into the past, to depicting a phrase written and then erased.
In all my work, traces and residue play an important role. Just as ancient palimpsests were formed from layers of marks and erasures, my imaging is often created through marking, erasing, and layering. The works within the palimpsest group parse the role of a reusable writing surface in somewhat modern terms - a blackboard. The mutability and layering of thought is imaged through the actions of writing, erasing, and striking out, allowing the past and present to coexist. Pass Through is an installation installed in an empty industrial warehouse with over 100 years of use preserved on its floors. The panels of the installation were created using a cast of the floor as a printing plate, then coated with beeswax and suspended to allow the present-day light from the windows commingle with the history of the space. Translucency and layering both reveal and obscure previous states in many of my works, whether it's the memory of a college text in Notes in the Margin, what's been erased on a blackboard in degrees of legibility, the positions of a spinning sculpture in the Against Gravity series, or the indecipherable text in the Unreadable works.
In some of my work I consider the role of the body in perception, thinking, and writing. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out in The World of Perception, "...man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things." I capture the gesture of the body that does the writing, the erasing, and the pausing. Many works reference the symmetry of our bodies on either side of a central spine (which not coincidentally, is the format of book pages and their connecting spine). My work often takes a horizontal experience and makes it vertical, to emphasize the posture from which humans are moving through the world and the perspective that informs our perception.
My work combines twenty-first century technologies with making methods that emphasize the idiosyncratic - the unique marks of handwriting and hand-stitching. By juxtaposing new and old ways of making, I raise questions about the role of text and mark-making in the age of mechanical reproduction. Does our virtual archive of words and images include the context from which they've been drawn? Where do words and images reside when they’ve been erased? If these words and images return, do they retain the history of their banishment?
Drawing from my fascination with moments of change, my artwork images the transience of time by juxtaposing what was with what is. My work is interdisciplinary; I create installations that combine photography, projection, video, hand-stitched work, and drawing. My investigations can range from capturing a text read and then forgotten, to imaging present events dissolving into the past, to depicting a phrase written and then erased.
In all my work, traces and residue play an important role. Just as ancient palimpsests were formed from layers of marks and erasures, my imaging is often created through marking, erasing, and layering. The works within the palimpsest group parse the role of a reusable writing surface in somewhat modern terms - a blackboard. The mutability and layering of thought is imaged through the actions of writing, erasing, and striking out, allowing the past and present to coexist. Pass Through is an installation installed in an empty industrial warehouse with over 100 years of use preserved on its floors. The panels of the installation were created using a cast of the floor as a printing plate, then coated with beeswax and suspended to allow the present-day light from the windows commingle with the history of the space. Translucency and layering both reveal and obscure previous states in many of my works, whether it's the memory of a college text in Notes in the Margin, what's been erased on a blackboard in degrees of legibility, the positions of a spinning sculpture in the Against Gravity series, or the indecipherable text in the Unreadable works.
In some of my work I consider the role of the body in perception, thinking, and writing. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out in The World of Perception, "...man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things." I capture the gesture of the body that does the writing, the erasing, and the pausing. Many works reference the symmetry of our bodies on either side of a central spine (which not coincidentally, is the format of book pages and their connecting spine). My work often takes a horizontal experience and makes it vertical, to emphasize the posture from which humans are moving through the world and the perspective that informs our perception.
My work combines twenty-first century technologies with making methods that emphasize the idiosyncratic - the unique marks of handwriting and hand-stitching. By juxtaposing new and old ways of making, I raise questions about the role of text and mark-making in the age of mechanical reproduction. Does our virtual archive of words and images include the context from which they've been drawn? Where do words and images reside when they’ve been erased? If these words and images return, do they retain the history of their banishment?