statement

The notion of souvenir underlies most of my art-making priorities.  In that respect I think back to specific souvenirs and keepsakes from trips or significant events in my life and understand my affection for the actual objects as the encapsulation, in physical form, of a set of places and feelings and people.  This impulse to collect, organize, and protect experiences is the most basic reason why I make things.  Many of my drawings find their origin in events or locations in my present or the personal mythology I've made from my past.  There's certainly a commemorative drive to my work that parallels the impulse someone might have to make a journal entry, take a photograph, or cross-stitch a picture celebrating a wedding or the Fourth of July.  At its best my practice is an act of attention, to memory, to tone, and to material.

Banner Year is part of an ongoing exploration into the idea of an ordered landscape.  Taking on a variety of formal manifestations this body of work puts forward a nature more codified than organic. The geometric layout of elements, unusual perspective, and symmetry present in most of my images suggest a landscape designed in the absence of a natural example. It's important to me that these spaces and objects acknowledge and engage their own artificiality and that they function as propositions more than pictures.

bio

born: 1980, Portsmouth, Virginia

education

University of Iowa, MFA, 2008
University of Mary Washington, BA, 2002

selected awards/honors

Residency, Yaddo, 2013
Creative Achievement Award in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech, 2013
First Place, 2013 Biennial Juried Exhibition, Roanoke College, Juror: Margot Norton, Curatorial Associate at the New Museum, 2013
Residency & Artist's Grant, Vermont Studio Center, 2012

selected publications

Stone Canoe #7; Syracuse University, p. 168-169, 2013

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Trykk 17, Grafisk Verksted: Together & Elevated *, Stavanger, Norway, 2013
Arlington Arts Center: SOLOS 2012, Arlington, VA, 2012
Times Club at Prairie Lights: Under the Bunker _ Travis Head & Deb Soklow, Iowa City, IA, 2011
Thompson Gallery, Furman University: Soft Eyes, Greenville, SC, 2010

selected group shows

Castle Gallery, The College of New Rochelle: Terra Incognita, New Rochelle, NY, 2013
Luise Ross Gallery: Small, New York, NY, 2011
UNC Asheville: Drawing Discourse, Asheville, NC, 2011
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Hudson Valley Artists 2010 *, New Paltz, NY, 2010