Artist Statement

In the fall of 2017, I grew close to someone whose very presence made an ordinary year feel almost perfect. Wee would laugh, share ideas, and move through life together, until new classes and new circumstances slowly made us strangers. What I had experienced as something vivid and real became just a memory, and the role art played in my life began to change. I began drawing crude drawings of characters I saw on television (I was very impressionable as a kid). Growing up in an immigrant family, I often felt that I was looking at life through two worlds: one inherited and one unfolding around me. Art became a haven. A place I could run to if my worlds failed to accomodate my eccentric mind. Later, it became a way of asking questions that ordinary thought could not settle. How do our decisions create the realities we inhabit? What becomes of the lives we might have lived? How does memory preserve beauty while also changing it? My practice moves between drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing because no individual art form can encompass every question. Imagine every art form as one of the five senses of the body. I choose materials according to what each work requires. Through monochrome mark-making, layered values, repeated text, constructed space, and photographic observation, I give intangible experiences a physical form. Images become windows into alternate lives, imagined places, and stories concealed within ordinary things. The subjects my work is on begin with absence, but I am not interested only in mourning what has disappeared. I am interested in what happens during that absence: the distance between an event and its memory, between the person we were and the person who remembers, between the physical world and the possibilities that continue to haunt it. My process is an attempt to enter that distance and return with evidence. Art cannot prevent loss, and it cannot restore a moment exactly as it was. It can, however, give disappearance a body. It can preserve the shape of an encounter long enough for someone else to stand before it and recognize something of their own life. Beneath every change in material or subject, this remains the impulse that drives my work, I never want to lose beauty like her again.