This piece was created using oil and blood on canvas. Following a final betrayal in a relationship (that inspired the performance "Enough," sculpture "Not Enough," and performance "If We Knew Then,") I wanted to create a self portrait to express the state I was in at the time. I had an overwhelming heaviness, and a numbness to my daily life, and yet, this sense was one I had to carry in silence. I had chosen to continue attempting to fix a relationship which had repeatedly made its demise apparent. I had watched the wound develop for months, I had anticipated it. Those closest to me knew about what was going on, in spite of everyone's advice, I continued to watch my relationship fall to pieces as I frantically tried to put it back together. This piece was, for me, about the experience everyone must have after placing their hand in fire and being burned repeatedly. It was about the feeling of dread that comes from understanding that despite the potential and genuine desire for change you see in people, sometimes you nor they can change their habits. 

This piece also marks my first successful attempt at the use of my own blood within my work. It is well understood that blood as a material signifies life, vitality, and energy. Yet almost globally, it is felt that removal of blood symbolizes loss, death, and pain. For this piece, my blood was integrated into the paint film, as a way to express conceptually the feeling of being overshadowed, or filtered through that loss. The (quite literal) scabbing of the surface and slow darkening of the entire image, relates to the slow development of these types of wounds. The almost cancerous malignancy that is presented by the experience of love, betrayal, and loss. 

This piece is the final form of an object that was made and used in multiple works. The Vase originally was created as a birthday gift to my partner, as a token of love. After I found out he was cheating however, the idea of that symbol being maintained made me sick. So I took it, along with a few other gifts I had made for him and destroyed them in a video titled “Enough.” After this, I chose to meditate on the notion of betrayal, healing, and self-worth while piecing the vase together again. Essentially creating a New symbol out of the same object. The Title “Not Enough,” relates to the feeling that I was not enough--that the original object, the love, was not enough. It also served as a strange prophecy that fulfilled itself when I eventually started trying to fix the relationship with him. Which later realized itself in the piece "Carcinoma..." seen above.

Much of my work is relevant to the notion that creation and destruction are in constant interplay, and that an object is never truly sealed in its power for meaning. Any given physical object, when reworked, readdressed, or recontextualized carries not just history but potential for new expressions. 

This ceramic work utilizes forms and colors of the French porcelain of the mid-1700s to address contemporary social issues. This piece deals with the accessibility to graphic violence that the internet has provided to children and adolescents. In the last three decades, with the rise of the World Wide Web, graphic, real life violence and gore has become readily available and placed in the hands of kids, through smart phones. There are websites dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and spreading such material. Each image painted on the vessel was created using images and footage from such websites.

Through the combination of mid-18th century french porcelain designs, with contemporary low-class imagery, I intend to question the ways in which our culture glorifies and fills its spaces with profane and violent aesthetics. 

The images painted within the four portals are all pulled directly from videos of real life violence. The pedestal houses the URL for the videos from which each were pulled. (1 Lunatic 1 Icepick, I Wanna Be a Narco Wife, Mexican Chainsaw Beheading, and the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs.)

This work was created through a two phase process. The first phase being the meticulous creation of  a traditional, realistic self portrait, and the second phase being the abstract expressionistic splatter superimposed upon the original image. This piece represents not only the construction of self-awareness, through it's union of conscious and chance-based processes, but also the relationship of Life and Death. (And Life in the face of Death.) This piece, through the process of spending intensive amounts of time before a destructive finale, is symbolic of the search for value and meaning of Life that all of us face when conscious of our own mortality. There is a drive in each of us to become notable, respected, prosperous, influential, which is nothing more than vane. We are all, regardless of what we are doing, running from death and attempting to find meaning in a Life without a sure one.