I am interested in the idea of travel, of our attraction to the unknown, the fragmentary, the imperfect, and the incomplete. The known turns into the unknown through the remains of physical, tangible forms in historical artifacts and ruins, which exist but remain incomplete. We flock to ruins of past ages to consider our identity in relation to time. In this way, we consider life in relation to death and work to draw the line of life back in connecting ourselves to the earth. There are roots and routes that can be drawn, documenting both our line of travel from place to place, but also our line from present to past existence. These lines move in patterns as we rise up and out of the landscape and back down again to become one with it. It is as though we are leaping ever towards some unknown, a progressive distancing from origin. This distancing is a fantasy realm of invented and imagined spaces that have only partial basis in the real.

Today people travel in many different ways and for many different reasons to escape, to educate themselves, to search out relaxation, to renew their social relationships, and perhaps simply to occupy themselves. We create our own reality by going to a different place. We may travel to an actual place, but our eyes and minds build this place into a fantasy realm as we imagine the unknown that we experience. We also travel virtually through the connection of the internet. People take on the alternative identity of an avatar to become a foreign body which can morph in various ways as they move from site to site. Through travel, we become a hybrid of ourselves and part of an artificial or imagined reality that we feel connected to. The ruin becomes a metaphor for this hybrid reality. It is real, but fragmented, open to interpretation of what it might have been.

This concept of a hybrid reality can be seen throughout my work through a complex layering of space. Patterns are printed in an underlying rhythm of color and transparency. The reality of the ruin is digitally morphed and then drawn onto the surface to form a suggested space. The fragments of this reality are built upon through various methods to transform the space into an imagined world. Figures move throughout, as characters floating over an environment that adapts and changes. Lines and cords form lyrical movement and suggested dialog. Shapes of light and abstraction are instances of transference. There is an overall sense of the internal fantasy melded with an external reality. The result is a view of invented histories, of fantastically completed fragments showing the connections and disconnections with a past that is not truly known.

born: 1975, Iowa

education

University of Iowa, MFA 2002
Coe College, BA 1998

selected awards/honors

Matter as Protagonist exhibition award winner, Creative Arts Workshop, juried by Jessica Stockholder, 2002
Graduate Honors in Painting, University of Iowa, 2002

selected publications

New American Paintings: Western Edition #78, Wellesley, MA: Open Studios Press, October 2008
Creative Quarterly: The Journal of Art and Design, Issue #13, New York, NY: 3x3 Publishing, December 2008
ArtWorld Digest, unAmbiguous, Brooklyn, New York: David Cohen, ed., March 2006.
New American Paintings: West Coast Edition #61, Wellesley, MA: Open Studios Press, December 2005

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Ballard Fetherston Gallery: Water-cast,  Seattle, WA, 2006
LoRiver Arts Gallery: Chlorine Beach, Beacon, NY, 2004
Fish Tank Gallery: Water-borne, Brooklyn, NY, 2003
Creative Arts Workshop: Winners of CAWs 2002 National Juried Exhibition,  New Haven, CT, 2003

selected group shows

Primo Piano LivinGallery of Contemporary Art: Nature Mutations, Lecce, Italy, 2009
Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery: Perfect with Pixel, Bowling Green, Ohio, 2008
Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, Dreamscapes, Zurich, Switzerland, 2007
Keki Gallery, Signals from/about Central Europe II: Selected Works from the Balatonfüred/Csopak, Budapest, Hungary, 2006