2015 - 2020

Samples of Auditioning Pieces for SUNY Purchase College

Spring 2021

Asthma 

Mixed Media Drawing from Digitally Altered Photo Reference 

2018

Pen, highlighters, watercolors, white acrylic paint, black marker, tape.

8" × 11"

This piece began with a photograph of myself, digitally manipulated, saturated, inverted, rearranged, then rendered by hand.

The work emerged from an Introduction to Art Therapy course at CUNY Queensborough Community College, in which a lesson explored the use of medical supplies as artistic mediums: an exercise in associating positive reinforcement with the materials of healing. The assignment asked us to reflect on that association. I reflected on the nebulizer mask.

I have had asthma my entire life. The mask is familiar in the way that only something uncomfortable and necessary can be, the artificial sensation of relief, the long stillness required while the medication vaporizes completely, the strange intimacy of depending on a device to breathe. A synthetic flower placed within the mask stands in for that artificial relief: something that resembles the natural, performing a function the body cannot manage on its own.

The layers of medium are not incidental. The uncomfortably vibrant colors were chosen to embody the strangely heightened sensations the medication produces, the feeling of being chemically corrected back into breath.

THINK WIDE OPEN (or, The Drawing Hand Draws Itself) 

Gesture Drawing from Observation 

2020

Pen on paper.

4½" × 8"

This drawing was made on a park bench, one of the few places visited during the pandemic to escape sibling abuse at home. Suffering from social anxiety, the act of drawing eased the panic of being present in a public space. The hand depicted is the hand that drew it: observed, traced, and actively engaged in the act of its own depiction as a way of managing overstimulation.

The drawing began at the tip of the pen, the point of origin, and worked outward. As each mark was made, more information became available: the relationship of the pen to the grip, the grip to the proportions of the hand. After each mark, the drawing hand returned to its initial pose to study itself more accurately. The result is a gesture drawing of a hand in the act of observing itself, creating itself.

To think wide open is to hold that act, the recursive loop of observation and creation, as a model for how we move through the world. It is a practice of persistent optimism against the pressure to conform: the willingness to pursue principled questions without the validation of others, while remaining honest about the uncertainty of whether any of it will matter. Our thoughts are glimpses into what remains closed to us. Our pilgrimage into the future builds and tears down the structures of the past so that others may one day consider their view with ours included.

If I Could Give You a Better Tomorrow 

Performative Sculpture 

2020

Watercolor on cotton inside a plastic snow globe filled with water, suspended on thread.

3" × 3" × 3"

This piece asks only one thing of the viewer: to look into the clouds for a moment.

A plastic snow globe filled with water. Inside, pulled pieces of cotton painted with watercolor, tied to thread and suspended, spun, the globe whirls, and the cotton moves the way clouds move through a lit sky. That is all it is, and that is the point.

The title names what the work cannot do. We cannot give each other better tomorrows. We can offer, at most, a moment of shared looking, a brief immersion in the hope of one. This sculpture was made for that moment, and for anyone who needs it. It is meant to be spun again and again, by anyone, indefinitely.

EIGHT 

Typography 

2020

Digital media.

6" × 6"

A palindrome, like a reflection, can be read in more than one direction.

This piece is built from four words, step, pets, time, emit, each a palindrome or reversal of another, arranged so that the design reads clockwise or counterclockwise, vertically or horizontally. The viewer is invited to rotate it. There is no single correct orientation.

The outer layer was constructed by rotating the surrounding letters 90 degrees from the starting points S and P. The inner layer was built through 180-degree rotations and reflections. Layered and overlapping, the texts create depth, refracting the digital painting beneath them the way a glitch refracts an image, breaking it into something that reveals its own structure. Primary colors move through the design's alternating transparencies, creating a cyclical narration with no fixed beginning or end.

Shadow Tracing 

Acrylic Painting 

2020

Acrylic paint on picture frame glass.

10" × 12"

Revisiting the park, one of the few places available during the pandemic for quiet and escape, a glass picture frame was placed on a dark, flat surface resting on the lap. Black acrylic paint was used to trace the contour of leaf reflections cast from the tree above: not the leaves themselves, but their shadows, their outlines, the version of them that light and glass made available.

The frame was then placed on a scanner with white paper beneath it and enhanced digitally to redefine contrast, the traced shadow becoming a print, the print becoming the final object.

The process draws inspiration from Islamic art and its tradition of abstaining from direct depictions of human or animal form, a constraint that redirects attention toward pattern, geometry, and the natural world as a surface for contemplation rather than representation. Shadow tracing was also, more immediately, a way of managing social anxiety: a quiet, absorbing act that made the presence of a public space bearable.

The painting does not attempt to perfectly render nature. It celebrates the impossibility of doing so, and the beauty that remains in the attempt.

TEN 

Surreal Figurative Painting 

2020

Digitally saturated alcohol markers and pen over watercolor and acrylic paint on paper.

6" × 8"

This piece began with a face painted onto a face.

A Francis Bacon self-portrait was applied directly onto the skin, then photographed in front of a colorful, collared shirt and a mirror. The photograph was digitally manipulated to saturate the colors, then hand-rendered in layers, paint, marker, pen on paper, before being scanned and manipulated again, each pass deepening the image's emotional register. Finally, the painting was repeated in layers and tilted, collapsing into an abstracted landscape of faces.

The process mirrors what it depicts. Each layer of translation, skin to photograph, photograph to painting, painting to scan, scan to composition, introduces a new degree of distance from the original image, the way dissociation introduces distance from the original self. The hazy, saturated colors of the surreal figurations embody the melancholic euphoria of drifting into an imagined reality: the strange comfort and disorientation of cognitive dissonance, the feeling of watching yourself from somewhere slightly outside your own body.

Bacon painted figures as though they were caught mid-dissolution. This painting continues that impulse, and turns it inward.

Land of 

Drawing from Imagination 

2015

Pen on colored paper.

8" × 11"

Every face in this landscape was drawn without drafting, beginning at the bottom of the page and working toward the horizon. The drawing was completed in pieces: classrooms, train rides, buses. Transitory locations for a transitory period.

The work was made during an unstable point in life. The monstrous landscape, is a macro view of a nightmarish scene, each face individually rendered and accumulating into something larger and more unsettling than any one of them alone. It is a drawing about fearing unknown strangers, made in the middle of them, one face at a time.

Anywhere but Here 

Drawing from Observation 

2020

Pen on cut paper and magazine collage.

4½" × 8"

Drawn from observation in my love's car, a vehicle that served, during the pandemic, as a kind of safe haven: a contained space for inspiration, creativity, and the feeling of being somewhere other than where life had become.

The drawing depicts the claustrophobic interior of that space honestly, then intervenes. The windows, mirrors, and glass panels were cut out and replaced with tranquil sceneries and floral vegetation, liberation imposed onto confinement, the view outside made into something the view outside never actually was. The paraphernalia scattered throughout the piece documents the personal items and materials of daily life during that period: small evidence of who was there and what they carried.

In the passenger seat, the artist is depicted depicting the depiction.

Anywhere but here is a destination, a direction, and a love letter to the feeling of almost being free.

My Heart Is an Inoperable Fidget Spinner 

Origami Sculpture 

2020

Newspaper with blue and red thread.

4" × 5"

This piece is folded from a single copy of the New York Post, its cover story, Nailbiter, a right-leaning newspaper chosen deliberately. Blue and red thread stitch opposite sides of the heart-shaped form, each color pulling against the other. The spinner cannot spin. Its size and weight make it inoperable by design.

The fidget spinner was a cultural object of 2017, a toy marketed as a tool for managing anxiety, a way of channeling nervous energy into idle, repetitive motion. Here it becomes a heart: the organ most associated with feeling, rendered as a mechanism for coping with feeling, made from the media that helped produce the anxiety in the first place. The New York Post cover captures the uncertainty of election night. President Biden's victory is present in the blue thread stitched over that image of nail-biting, not a resolution so much as a new kind of uncertainty, announced in the color of one party over the image of another.

The piece cannot do what it promises. It is too heavy, too large, too contradictory to function. A disheveled object built from disheveled times, a heart that cannot settle, stitched together from things that do not agree.

wasitacatisaw 

Self-Portrait 

2020

Dry erase markers on picture frame glass.

10" × 12"

A self-portrait drawn on glass, the frame placed on a dark, flat surface resting on the lap, one eye closed, layers of blue and brown dry erase marker tracing the outline of a face that kept shifting as the hand moved across it. The tracing was scanned with white paper beneath it, then digitally altered to enhance saturation and contrast.

The title is a palindrome. Read left to right or right to left, it asks the same unanswerable question, the irony of any reflection, which shows you yourself only in reverse, only at a distance, only as others do not see you. A self-portrait is always an approximation. The glass made that literal: a surface that reflects before it records, that gives back an image before it accepts a mark.

What the photograph cannot capture is documented in the supplemental video: the difficulty and ambiguity of the process itself, the gap between looking and seeing, between the face and its representation. What remains is the trace. What it means is left to whoever is looking.