I was born in Illinois in 1983 and I continue to live there today.  Despite always having had the urge to grab a crayon or a camera, I'm something of an apprehensive artist.  It has taken time for me to grow comfortable with sharing my work with others.  As my voice has grown stronger, with ideas and critiques, I have found the prospect of sharing experiences through art quite advantageous.  Incidentally, many of the conversations in my own work are about art itself.  What does art mean to me?  What purpose does it serve in my life and in the lives of other folks?  What are the "boundaries" of the art experience?  Are there any?

Deconstruction is a major part of my thought process in and out of the studio.  Academically, I have pursued the study of art theory and criticism, finding it most rewarding to write about the problems and triumphs occurring in the art world today, as well as in the past.  As a philosopher, I thoroughly enjoy taking contemporary ideas into the past and considering historical cultures, art, and artists in new ways.  In my writing I use critical-theoretical frameworks to negotiate a more lucid and dynamic understanding of visual cultural traditions and how people interact with the visuality that permeates their lives.

A major strand throughout much of my artwork, beyond the broader inquirers into what art means socially, is the notion of object: object ownership, objectification of history, objectification of people, objectification of artwork and its many mediums; objectification of aesthetic pleasure; etc.  I often explore/exploit the idea of objecthood: how we decorate our lives with arbitrary, as well as meaningful, things; how we objectify the ones we love and the strangers we see; how we objectify pain and death; how we objectify complex and sensitive cultural histories.  I'm also deeply interested in understanding the reception of art, the reception of objects, and how extrinsic and intrinsic influences affect individuals' reception of the visuality they experience.

My artwork is also, at its core, an experimentation in composition, color, and form. Through a variety of mixed media I have chosen as my inspiration a color palette that is at times complimentary and at other times purposfully contradictory, or seemingly destructive. The literal destruction of an object is secondary, in my mind, to the overall effect created by color (dis)harmony and the overall aesthetic-emotional experience of the reclaimed and reinvented object. I openly play with the allure of foreign and aggressive new colors and forms, inviting them into otherwise familiar and traditional settings. Barriers and obstacles are thereby erected between the viewer and the object through which one must negotiate an understanding of what is both present and hidden.  What does the creation of new menaing tells us about old meanings, or meaning in general?

My readymade works frequently deal with the re-contextualization of decorative art objects.  By retooling the object and then re-presenting it before the viewer I intend to add new layers to the conversation that takes place between the observer and the object in its original state.  By reclaiming these objects I mean to acknowledge how our possessions (can/do) define us. In so many innumerable ways the bric-a-brac of our lives becomes a unit of measure of our own worth—I wish to subvert this measure.  I enjoy infiltrating this territory of being and I revel in pointing to the superficial and the wonderfully imperfect character traits in all of us.

—the artist, 2012