statement
My current work reflects the emotional texture of living in 2026. In a moment shaped by political volatility, social fracture, and accelerating technology, I feel called to look closely at the physical world rather than turn away from it. Though I find beauty in the ordinary, it is with an ever present tremor of unease. In representing an unstable world, layers misalign, spaces are simultaneously shallow and deep, and painted veils disrupt photographic clarity. This work emerged as a shift away from pure drawing and overtly nightmarish imagery, not from a desire to abandon darkness, but from the realization that nightmares have bled into the day. The anxiety, disorientation, and hyper alertness once reserved for dreams now inhabit waking life.
I maintain a daily practice of gathering photographs of mundane things such as windows, gates, and weeds. These images are digitally layered into photographic collages, printed in black and white, and adhered to wooden panels. From there, color is added with acrylic paint and colored pencil. The process allows me to hold onto the documentary nature of the photograph while destabilizing it, creating surfaces that feel both real and unreliable. The technique mirrors how experience accumulates in the mind and in the media, imperfectly, through erasures, revisions, and continual updating.
By combining digital processes with the hand, I acknowledge technology’s usefulness while resisting it as a final authority. These hybrid surfaces cannot be categorized as purely painting, drawing, photography, or collage. I have recently begun installing finished panels in space and creating video installations, extending this instability into the physical environment. Many works have multiple orientations, suggesting that nothing is fixed. In a time when AI images further erode photographic truth, I am interested in activating the discomfort around visual honesty and hierarchy. I hope the work produces a slow unease that mirrors daily life inside layered systems of capitalism, where anxiety emerges from the seemingly tranquil through close inspection.
My work is also deeply tied to Pittsburgh. Haunted by and proud of its industrial history, the city is in a moment of reinvention, even branding a main thoroughfare “AI Avenue.” Coming from the West, where space feels expansive, I am inspired by Pittsburgh’s compressed verticality and layered topography, where accumulation, erosion, and persistence are visible everywhere. My work reflects this collision of past, present, and future, forming pictures that often feel like industrial residue.
Ultimately, my work sits in a place of tension between the innocuous and the terrifying, between the obvious and the obscured, questioning: One day, will the weeds stop growing from the sidewalk? Someday, will the shadows of drones pepper the pavement? When I’m eighty, how many of these fears will be founded? Will I ever just enjoy a walk again?