The video/sound below is my most recent artist statement from November, 2023.

I am an artist living and working in San Marcos, TX.  I am a  Lecturer at Texas State University where I teach drawing and foundations, and at St. Edward's University where I teach Visual Studies.  I received my BFA from Texas State University in 2015 and my MFA from Southern Methodist University in 2019. 

My work, a combination of painting, drawing, and performance, deals with boundaries.  What makes us want to separate vision from the physical body?  Why do we contain and define images the way we do? What happens when those kinds of boundaries are blurred?  

To accomplish this blurring, I deconstruct cultural fantasies of white femininity through pop culture or subjective experience, mingling my life and vision with fantasies of feminine presence.  Lana Del Rey, Forensic Files, Law and Order SVU, Taylor Swift, and other vessels for this idea have been my references over the years.  If I'm not looking at a popular representations of white women in America, usually I'm thinking of my own life as a starting point, examining the spaces I inhabit and my appearance and behavior in them, with a goal of transcending all limitations of living and thinking and making art with freedom.  I see these exercises as part of conversations about race, gender, and corporate power in America and the ongoing deterioration of existing power dynamics.  I am influenced by feminist artists like Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann as well as by literary and philosophical precedents set by Kathy Acker and Julia Kristeva. I am equally influenced by male artists who innovate around the meaning and function of the picture plane and history of painting, such as Rackstraw Downes and Francis Bacon.

I use my interest in the history of painting and drawing and inventions such as perspective and the use of the picture plane to explore relationships between my body, pop culture figures, identity and subjectivity, and the way we contain those ideas in the neat rectangular packages of pictures.
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I have exhibited work both regionally and nationally.  My most recent solo exhibition, held at Texas State University's Flex Space and titled Cat's Cradle, dealt with images of the drug addict/beauty-fashion personality Cat Marnell made between 2012 and 2020.