The older I get the more I find myself thinking about how to slow down life, this passing of time that no matter what seems to be racing past. It can feel that more and more everything is telling me to not pay attention to that. In my thinking I end up coming back to the same things. You slow this life down, you in a sense fight back by choosing the beauty you see and feel in the textures of life. As I sit on this bench next to guys working on cars under the bridge, the train passing overhead, there is a sense of togetherness, of stillness.
A moment. A moment you can now hold onto. Moments that so often pass without ceremony. In my eye these moments become their own form of resistance. Resistance to the speed of life, resistance to what feels as the agenda to keep us apart, to not build community, to not realize this power we have.
I work with found material, salvaged plastics, printed ephemera, advertising pulled from the walls. I choose them for what they carry as much as what they are. Almost connecting the idea that value is a result of how you treat something, how you choose to see something. These materials themselves arrived layered with time, a lost agenda. Working with them feels like an investigation to what was, what can become. I'll break them down past a point of recognition, color blocking, distorting, adding and retracting, building environments through this new life of used material. A new life and energy, re-born. It isn't collage for its own sake, its environment and rebirth of a surface becoming a painting that has earned its surface.
Within this environment I bring figure and scene. The environment presses in, omnipresent and consuming, yet the figures exist within it, persist within it. That coexistence, the persistence is where the work lives.
1995
Born in Philadelphia, living in New York, NY