Artist's Statement
I am interested in the post-industrial beauty of Bushwick, Brooklyn, the poor and working class neighborhood that surrounds my studio. Parts of Bushwick resemble a post-apocalyptic landscape of rubble, urban decay, defunct businesses and abandoned houses. Within this bleak landscape scattered amid the debris are macabre vignettes, like clumps of shoes hovering incongruously above the street or morning glories intertwined with barbed wire on the perimeters of junk yards.
This odd landscape possesses a simultaneous allure and menace that I take as the starting point for my paintings. I juxtapose candy-colored skies with ghostly out-of-focus imagery, and dark silhouettes. I purposely use inviting, painterly surfaces to depict forbidding wires, satellite dishes, and video surveillance cameras as an expression of this dichotomy of menace and allure. Based on what I see, I invent architectural amalgams in which contemporary structures are grafted onto older ones. The result is a visual hodge-podge both comical and poignant, not unlike Bushwick itself. I invite the viewer to enter an urban dystopia where familiar elements are composed in unfamiliar combinations. Sensuous brushstrokes and colors create a luscious unease.
I aim to represent the social, ecological, and economic collisions happening between people and their environment. In this sense my work has a political intention: I intend to provoke thought about the post-industrial landscape and the resilience of nature.