Pittsburgh Artist Registry

Artist Statement:

“Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.”

As an artist I have always struggled with my personal dichotomy and grappled with themes of emotional conflict and turmoil. Textbook difficulties of self-loathing, narcissism, destructive behavior, and substance abuse have plagued my adult life. While personable and gregarious on the exterior, beneath the surface is a very different persona.

My early work sought to define this feeling through dozens of self-portraits and personal imagery all depicting the same sense of melancholy or somberness. It was only upon extended investigation that I realized that this approach was flawed and pedestrian for so many reasons while also incorrectly representing myself as perpetually unhappy or sad. I was searching for a way to articulate the helplessness that I feel as an artist. Ultimately I fall victim to the age old cliché: dammed if I do…dammed if I don’t! My struggle revolves around the feeling of suffocating under the self-created expectations that I ultimately never satiate.

I have been working to communicate this content formally and with a subtle sense of narrative by applying the human figure or other ambiguous meta-narratives.  Through cramming and contorting the human form, multiple repeating appendages (echoes), and ambiguous things concealed in cloth, I aim to achieve a disquieting tension which serves both as a metaphor and as symbol for empathy revolving around the human condition.