This exploration began with the built environment. My hometown of Los Angeles functions as an immense collage made up of a hodgepodge of diverse elements: an accumulation of architectural histories, formal references, legible structures of power, and in-your-face iconography. This awkward and fragmented yet unified environment carries a persistent sense of dissonance, and I was drawn to how these formal and spatial qualities coexist and relate to one another. Los Angeles revealed itself as a stratified palimpsest and this condition informed my desire to explore the dissonance embedded within its visual and spatial systems.
Paying attention to how meaning operates in space, in an urban and architectural context, led me to notice how meaning operates similarly in language. This became most apparent to me in the way words relate to one another. Words don’t have meaning because of their essence, but because of their relation to one another. Something can only mean something when it’s next to something else, and words alone don’t carry understanding from one person to another. They function as signals that are interpreted through memory, context, and difference. Meaning is not transmitted but produced relationally. I approach painting through this same logic.
When I paint, meaning becomes something I explore haptically and through fragmented reference. Rather than attempting to construct meaning from nothing, my paintings borrow from an already existing world of forms, materials, and references. They remain largely abstract, yet occasionally give a nod to representation, sometimes allowing familiar forms to not fully register, leaving room for interpretation. I layer, build, cut back, peel, fragment, suture, conceal, mask, relieve, and reveal, allowing decision-making and time to remain apparent and active. Dissonance emerges when forcing together materials and forms that don’t easily cohere, producing objects that carry contradiction and awkwardness within them. Through this process, acrylic and oil paint, spackling paste, yarn, found objects, and other materials operate as agents rather than neutral tools. Meaning arises through friction between parts and whole.
This produces a Frankenstein-like cohesion: an accidental beauty that parallels the postmodern urban condition of Los Angeles, where fragments, histories, and intentions are held together without resolving into a seamless whole. In this sense, my work holds space for disorder rather than dissolving it. Meaning remains relational, informed by a balance of freedom and order, and experienced through tension rather than the comfort of resolution.
Acrylic and oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
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Acrylic and dried paint chips on canvas
10 x 13 3/4 inches
Acrylic, oil, and transparency film on wood panel
18 x 24 inches
Acrylic on wood panel
6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches
Acrylic on canvas
16 x 12 inches
Oil on canvas
36 x 24 inches
Spackling paste, ink, acrylic medium, and paper on plywood
40 x 30 inches
Acrylic, pencil, tape, bottle caps, and glue on plywood
40 x 30 inches
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Acrylic, spackling paste, ink, paper, and marker on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Acrylic, oil, and spackling paste on canvas
10 1/2 x 24 inches
Acrylic, yarn, and thread
32 x 17 inches