For this show, I wanted to move in a different direction aesthetically and create work inspired by early-mid 20th century surrealist work, with a tinge of Pop. I also was interested in the challenges of integrating text into art, something I believe is difficult to do well in visual art. Last but not least I wanted to create work that is less about a direct narrative and more about the subconscious, and how we operate in the social and environmental worlds around us.

The phrases in these collages are multi-tiered and double-sided; intended to reflect a sort of personal and societal inertia of mind and lifestyle, both in the sense of being frozen, and moving too fast in a direction to change course. I wanted them to be about states of mind and being, in terms of personal and global events; things that happen on a day-to-day basis and things that happen over the courses of our lives. They’re about the decisions we make, and the twists of fate we encounter. They are intended to reflect the multifaceted moments of joy and anxiety, nostalgia and anticipation, which are part of being alive. I wanted them to be open to interpretation as either uplifting, or melancholy.

Disguising these messages as strangely grafted, twisted plantlife works for me in the sense that, the themes I’m addressing are composed of so many different elements; moments, feelings, and phases of life will shift, grow, die, be confusing, complicated, intangible, and difficult to put into words, along with our memories of them and the events connected to them. Creating the phrases as landscapes, or specimens of wildlife, was sort of like isolating an aspect of our internal environments.

I see them essentially as simulacrum of things that sometimes have no real shape.