DIMINISHING CONNECTIONS.

I explore our skin’s durability as it protects our inner being, but its fragility in our death. Paint allows me to understand the physical quality of skin and the structure behind ones surface. We experience the world and one another through this outermost layer of our selves, providing the ability to feel touch, establishing ones corporeal bounds and connections.

Skin provides a means of communication and interaction, of touch and intimacy. It contains, protects, and stretches with the growth of the body, adapting to the interior bodily demands. It is through this growth that there is also a regression or a slow decay of the body.

In addition to the exterior exploration, I also investigate the vitality of our viscera even when disease destroys it and claims our lives. From this visual exploration the tension between the reality of life and death begins to emerge.

My paintings engage the disconnect of both living and dying. Our experiences of both can be beautiful and repulsive, intimate and removed, private and public, and involve connections as well as loss. My work’s content, formal qualities, and historical and contemporary references, elicit physical, emotional, and existential reflections on life and death.