ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice shuffles the digital realm back into physical material, to reflect the ever-increasing presence of technology within our daily lives, just as our own experiences occur in the physical space, are processed through the digital realm, and then reemerge into lived spaces. My works are sourced from my own past work, then reconstructed into new digital compositions to use as the base of my paintings. My shapes emerge both in the digital space and physical space, reflecting hard-edged scraps of Exacto-knife pieces, but also the digital vocabulary of Microsoft Paint tools and Photoshop’s Polygonal Lasso Tool. The digital compositions are then transferred onto wooden material, where I use electric sanding to merge the digital image into physical material, revealing both the physical nature of the digital print and the impact of my hand on the material.

By using an electric sander to tear into the surface, I remove parts of the image from high surfaces or relief texture of the medium. The sanding process is an exploration of where destruction and chance are generative, in their capacity to explore space and texture that is not possible on the flat screen. In my work, I aim to explore the intersections of digital and painterly space, as the physical material, the loss of print, and creation of space push me in a painterly corner to react to the surface at hand.

 Through my use of abstraction and the physicality of paint, I break apart the screens and revolving images to which we are glued. Through abstraction, the unreality of digital spaces becomes a metaphor for the illusion of space—where through paint and physical material, resurfaces the image in lived space as a way to process our experiences. A digital collage, transferred onto the wood material, allows me to insert myself into the space to reflect on how we treat the digital, see through it, and where I align myself with it.

In my work, I use the digital effect, the drop shadow, as primary content to reveal invented spaces for the viewer to navigate and understand space created on a two-dimensional plane. I am particularly interested in the drop shadow, as it reflects the cast shadow in the real world and how its produced digitally on the screen with no “real” light source; it’s all an illusion. In my work, I aim to merge high art, painting’s illusionistic history in High Renaissance and the trompe l’oeil technique, with low art, digital imaging software, where shadows serve the same function of creating space, although misrepresenting real-world laws, in both the screen and in painting. This can be seen in Most Drop Shadows Are Ugly, 2024, where I utilize irony to highlight the function of the drop shadow and designs culture of simultaneously disliking the drop shadow and using it daily to create space. My work encourages the viewer to consider a different hierarchy of focus and takes on the arrangement of surfaces and space, rather than the requirements of the physical world.