Collage

BFA Alumni

Major: Painting

Graduation Year: 2017

Artist Statement:

I am attracted to the idiosyncrasies of the material world through internalizing pattern, color, and form. The grid is a structure I frequently use because I want to manipulate and challenge its rigidity and uniformity. I see my work as a series of formal experimentations.

Arts writer and critic, Lane Relyea, wrote about the resurgence of formalism in a 1998 essay, Virtually Formal. My favorite sentence is from the end of his argument. He states, “Formalism has always been shot through with hybridity – it dreams of purebreds and ends up describing mutts.” The idea of wanting to create a pure and beautiful object, contrasts with the reality of the messy, unwieldy, melded constructions that typically results. This filtration system of interpreting a material landscape culminates into a hybridity of inspiration and ideas, which I turn into images.