What is my work about?
My small scale paintings, drawings, and monoprints record, digest, and codify my everyday experiences. In this sense, the work is simultaneously intimate, prolific, and intensely diaristic. I work every day on several pieces to create my own vocabulary of icons, emblematic motifs, and personal hieroglyphs.
The inspiration for this iconography is far and wide, high and low, universal and decidedly shrouded in the personal. To my eye, the architecture in my Queens neighborhood holds the same aesthetic weight as the horses on the Alexander Sarcophagus in the Istanbul Archealogical Museum. I’m always looking – cataloguing fragments of images for later use; the mauve color of a hospital water pitcher; the necklace I happen to be wearing that day; the color of my wallpaper in a Florentine hotel room are all material for future work.
In short, my work is a way of compartmentalizing the anxieties of my fleeting youth in New York City, and finding beauty in the face of inexorable decline.
Artist Statement
I make paintings, drawings, and monoprints voraciously— in the hopes of creating a cyclical, personal language based on observation(see: You’re Gonna Go Fast) and abstraction(see: Shadowboxer). I do not regard any one mode of working to be more significant than another. I use all three mediums collectively to make my work, resulting in both a shared conceptual and visual lineage. A drawing done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art carries as much importance as a painting worked on over the course of two years. When I am working I make no distinctions between painting, drawing, and printing—I use the three symbiotically; and freely employ whatever technique the imagery demands.
The drawings are always made from direct observation. While sometimes they become highly stylized and exaggerated they share an emotional and formal directness through straight application of a single medium(see:Haven’t Got My Ticket To Leave). Shape, clarity, and intentionality are their principal concerns.
The paintings are palimpsests. The paintings begin with a single rule. A rule can be as simple as to begin by painting the entire panel blue and then embark upon an intuitive exploration of moves( see: I Will Always Be the One to Carry You Home); a device of employing structure and chance to transform chaos into an ordered and controlled experience. A rule with more emotional impetus is at play in Chicken Dinner Party. The directive here is to attempt to capture the wild, swinging histrionic emotions present at the family dinner table. The table represents an emotionally charged stage filled with a manic depressive’s rage, disappointment, and unconditional love. The painting aims to evoke that chaotic life-threatening timbre through motifs that are tacked on, pushed back, covered up, and layered. The patina of those anxious marks is held down by the indelible yellow enamel shape, an amalgamation of two entirely separate drawings.
When I begin a painting although a parameter has been put into place I relish the feeling that I have both everything and nothing to loose. The frenetic energy either slowed down or sped up based upon what I choose to paint, allows for surprise in the process.
I paint to cheat death. In Holland Cotter’s review of Sigmar Polke’s recent MoMA retrospective he cites Polke as an artist who used “commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses, but no periods, no full stops.” With this idea I feel a particular kinship.
My paintings and drawings will have a much longer life than mine. They allow me to communicate into an infinite future. My practice is at once both an attempt to live forever and a concession that I will not. The acceptance of the idea of mortality as a physical sense rather than one of rationality marks the point of origin for the work. I am interested in elemental life questions concerning birth, sex, survival, illness, life, and death. When a piece of antiquity is pulled from its trove and placed on display- it is recorded by the contemporary humanity that it faces. This recording of objects and making of marks is a timeless human endeavor.
My paintings will never grow old.
They will always be young & beautiful.
CV
EDUCATION
2013 MFA Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2011 BFA Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
Group Velocity, Curated by Summer Guthery, Interstate Projects, Bushwick, NY
2013
Miami Project, Wynwood Arts District, Miami, FL
We Object, Curated by Wallace Whitney, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Touch, Westside Gallery, New York, NY
The End is Also the Beginning, C.A.M Galeri, Istanbul,Turkey
2011
Meandros Festival, Minder Rugs from the Gullubahce Hali Workshop, Priene,Turkey
Who Needs A Master Anymore?, New York, NY; Krakow, Poland; Union, NJ
2010
Gullubahce Rugs: A Collaborative Project between the Priene Rug Workshop of Gullubahce, Turkey and artists from the School of Visual Arts, New York City, Westside Gallery, New York, NY.
Meandros Festival, Minder Rugs from the Gullubahce Hali Workshop, Priene, Turkey
2009
Priene Hali Benefit, C.A.M Galeri, Istanbul, Turkey
Three Little Pigs, 85 Franklin Street, New York, NY
PANEL DISCUSSIONS
2013
Freshly Minted, SVA Theatre, New York, NY
TEACHING
2014
Drawing, Honors Department, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
Drawing, Pre-College Summer Program, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2013
Visiting Artist, Visual and Critical Studies Department, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2014
Jury Member, Moon and Stars Project, The American Turkish Society, Visual Arts Scholarship
2013-2011
Teaching Assistant to Peter Hristoff, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2011
Teaching Assistant, Pre-College Portfolio Development, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY