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 professor at Texas State University where I teach drawing and foundations. I have also taught at St. Edward's University in 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, performance, and video, 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’s the difference between my art and my life, my self and others? What happens when those kinds of boundaries are blurred?  

To accomplish this blurring, I manipulate the edges of the picture plane, making it soft, irregular, jagged, broken or unbroken, sometimes rigid and predictable. I see painting and drawing as the essential objects for exploring separations between mind and body, self and other, my life against a busy backdrop of pop culture images.  Performance, video and sound works build on my experiments with these separations in painting by dramatically expanding the boundaries of the art object, making the difference between art and life less discernible. Within the art’s boundary, I treat my subjects with a similar impulse to disintegrate and show openness. The lines that contain bodies are discontinuous. Background and foreground mingle but never fully flatten. Objects become each other. Ambiguity is important to me.
 

I use what’s in my mind and what I see for my art, not because it’s accessible, but as a deliberate method for accessing the real, which I think comes through as a subjective experience.  For that reason, Lana Del Rey, Forensic Files, Law and Order SVU, Taylor Swift, and other vessels have been my references over the years.  Popular representations of white femininity are often part of my subject matter, not because I’m making direct statements or criticisms about identity, but because my identity and issues with it are all around me when I observe.
 

 These exercises are part of conversations about race, gender, and the ongoing deterioration of existing power dynamics in my society, though I'm not satisfied by simply representing these problems. I’m trying to find a way out of a nihilism that either cloisters the self in embattled identity or martyrs the self in attempts to fight perceived evil sites of guarded power.
 

I am influenced by feminist artists like Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann as well as by literary and philosophical precedents set by Chris Kraus 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.