I am an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with ceramic sculpture, painting, and prints. My work focuses on how traditional crafts and contemporary sculpture can be re-imagined, and infused with social commentary and queer narratives. I create assemblages that layer patterns, marks, and materials that obliterate portraits in which the underlying images are pushed to the verge of abstraction. These images are then wrapped around or juxtaposed with fragmentary figures often made of clay. The ceramic surfaces are printed, painted, and incised with gestural sgraffito that cuts through representational form, expanding upon a visual and physical omission.
My work confabulates revisionist histories with queer and peculiar personae whose stories of omission are reimagined through a codex of portraits and ceramic artifacts. For example, I make prints on paper and porcelain culminating in sculptural assemblages and mono-prints incorporating police surveillance footage used during a sting operation to arrest gay men. The obfuscated portraits of these men, hide narratives of self-invention and act as a metaphor for historical erasure. The assemblages are reminiscent of makeshift street shrines that spring up in moments of celebration, or loss, and reverence. These erasures, no matter how great the omission, reveals an absence. Some of us can’t help but reveal our nature. A pentimento, a residual trace of the portraits beneath comes to the surface.