ARTIST STATEMENT

​​My practice spans collage, art signage and painting. A previous graphic design career strongly informs everything I do: impact and nuance, text and typography, structure and serendipity — and with luck — some wit, beauty and insight.

In my recent collage work, I have been remixing contemporary mainstream fashion imagery to investigate notions of identity, beauty, and evolving social norms. How do we present ourselves to the world? How do outside pressures alter our self-expression? What feels safe? Dangerous? Beautiful? These nascent themes connect to and expand upon my previous works that attempt to support our personal growth, creativity and humanity by subverting authority and offering resistance to our limiting beliefs.

Given the size of the magazines, books, papers and ink jet prints I work with, my original collages are modestly scaled. To give these works increased drama, I have been enlarging them: amplifying the printing dots and imperfections, paper textures, tears and cuts. This transforms them into a new kind of artwork with the kind of visual impact only scale can afford. There is also a rawness, a bit of “street” that I find utterly captivating, and that aligns with aspects of my other work in painting and signage.

I’m excited to further develop these collages and enlargements, and in time see how they might combine with other aspects of my practice.