statement

"The pensive man... He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest."
-Wallace Stevens, The Connoisseur of Chaos

The consistent tension between order and chaos is inherent in anything formed through an organic process.  It creates a kind of stability that is ceaselessly in motion, a fabric that weaves the two together into an imperfect pattern that is simultaneously volatile and pensive.  In its effect on the land we witness both revelation and destruction, formation and deconstruction through the agents of time, leaving the dismembered, altered remains of a once cohesive structure.  Young trees become dead trees that break and fall, become fragments and abstractions of what once grew steadily upward, become pieces to be manipulated by hands and elements.  Rock formations emerge from millions of years of geological change, from violent shifts of vast plates, the movement of glaciers and oceans that are simultaneously destructive and generative.  Fibers tangle and churn, brought together and apart through interior and exterior shifts in movement, becoming testaments to an alternate order.

Through an investigation of the faculties of the drawn line, I hope to engage this phenomenon in my work by both witnessing and interacting with it.  I attempt to activate the histories of seemingly inert specimens and stilled landscapes while acknowledging the forces of change inherent in their existence with an attention to the detailed and patterned order within them.  Using the format of landscape, of portraiture, of specimen analysis, and of distorted fields of pattern, using a combination of unpredictable watercolor wash, precise pen and ink, and woodblock relief printing, I hope to embrace the ability of objects to serve as both macrocosm for their places of origin and microcosm for the larger phenomenon of revealing and distorting.  In depicting the weather-worn, the tangled, and the weary, I try to find a language to describe them all that befits both infinite complexity and ordered chaos.

bio

born: 1986, New York

education

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, MFA, 2012
Oberlin College, BA, 2008

selected awards/honors

Merit Scholarship, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2010-2012
PoGo Grant for Exhibition and Installation, Oberlin College, 2008

selected publications

Bread and Butter Collective; 2012 Calendar, New York, NY, 2011
Helmet Magazine; Issue #4: Girls.  Chicago, IL, 2009

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Grizzly Grizzly Gallery: Totems and Topographies, Philadelphia, PA, 2012
International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Our Autonomy, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2009
Fisher Gallery: Nothing is Sacred, Oberlin, OH, 2008

selected group shows

International Print Center New York: New Prints 2012/Summer, New York, NY, 2012
Woodmere Museum: Elemental: Art as Nature in the Works of Philadelphia Artists, Chestnut Hill, PA, 2012
University City Arts League: Wish You Were There, Philadelphia, PA, 2011
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery: Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, Washington, DC, 2009-2010