artist statement:
My work has four elements: love, death, people, and animals. These form the starting points for anything I make. Love and death are two limit points of experience, and people and animals are able to approximate an encounter with those limits.
I make different structures using these parts: drawings, animations, installations, and writings. Elements of landscape and architecture appear throughout these works: walls, grass, icebergs, dirt, and the ocean. These function as sets and props to support the characters in these awkward tragedies: cats and dogs, dead relatives, rodents, the kid, and the brain doctor.
My experiences influence the specificity of these characters, settings, and themes. When I was a kid, I walked down the train tracks to the edge of town with my friend to look at a huge dead crow. I felt a kinship with the boys in Stand By Me with this coming of age, but of course my encounter was much simpler. Still: the moldering bird, a bunny my dog tried to eat—these were my first forays into an inkling of mortality, an understanding that has since broadened and deepened inevitably and against my desires. Faced with the impossibility of characterizing mortality, I look back to these moments of awe to formulate a language for approaching death and loss. I want my viewers to remake these early encounters with me, to become my companions in brief confrontations with the unknown.
Looking deeply into anything with wonder is a form of re-generation and of self-abuse. This is the connective thread running through religion, love, sex, death, and all methods of amplifying the imagination. Making something to look at deeply with wonder is particularly complicated.
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