My current work explores collage technique in the broad sense: appropriation as a discursive act, an interweaving of disparate elements into new hybrid possibilities. This exploration can take the form of collaged book fragments embedded in layers of resin, video collages, sound experiments and installations of found materials. I am interested in combining precise details from different visual languages into a single surface or environment in order to foment new connections between them.
I often create imagery that is amplified or saturated to the point that it becomes simultaneously difficult and alluring to look at, and I want viewers to be able to linger with the images they see. Fragments meld together to form one sprawling “choose your own adventure”, allowing viewers to trace and connect specific lines of narrative within the work. I am specifically interested in the conditions under which someone will perceive intention, relation or cohesion between visual information that otherwise appears to be randomly or haphazardly arranged. I explore this ambiguity structurally through dense, interlocking compositions, as well as through semiotic correlations between the visual fragments I collage: details of baroque paintings and geological diagrams meld into casseroles from obsolete cookbooks and comic-hero muscle ripples; fish scales are woven into sewing diagrams, battle maps and bird plumage.
I tend to equate my visual practice to an alchemical process, distilling the semiotic residues from appropriated images and using the results to carry out divinatory readings. Or as a method of triangulation that allows forms to emerge in the intersections of different modes of knowledge.
I am also interested in psycho-geography, Mayan hieroglyphs, animal behavior, baroque morphology, camouflage, information theory, old cookbooks, technical manuals, weather patterns, dazzle painting, illustrated encyclopedias, comic books, science fiction, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder.