I work across different modes of painting, design, DJing, and event hosting to investigate intersections between affect, semiotics, and the conditions of late capitalism. In my paintings, visual play and gestural improvisation serve as metonym for navigating and making sense of the structures that prop up our worlds. I take seemingly neutral images and symbols such as signage, diagrams, and graphical representations as starting points for this painterly modulation and association. These modulations occur through varied modes of mark-making including gesture, obfuscation, and the slow accumulation of thin washes of paint. Researching, scrambling, and resituating signs in my paintings is my way of questioning the images that determine our movements and feelings.

 

My practice extends beyond painting primarily through dance music and nightlife. Rave culture and history provide for me not only conceptual inspiration for my studio work, but sensorial engulfment and pleasure as well. Both painting and DJing operate as spaces of sensorial play and alterity for me; the two are always informing each other. Fluorescent colors inspired by nightclub lighting and the visual culture of 1990s dance music often make up the compositional frameworks of my underpaintings. In turn, sonic lushness and syncopation in my music selection and mixing style reflect the layered visual play of my painting process. These crossovers in sensibility are informed equally by my time in the studio and my time spent on dancefloors. The social aspects of my music practice have also moved me to explore an ethos of collaboration and celebration in making. My collaborative printmaking and design work, often manifested as party flyers for both real and imagined events, conceptually complement my paintings and tether my visual and sound/time-based practices together.

 

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