The Unknown Territory

Abstract

Abstract

Two years ago, at the beginning of my MFA program, I started to question my identity. Moving to a new place and land directed me into a more fundamental and vital understanding of myself and my place on earth. Because the move led me to look at my art from a different perspective, I realized that my work was becoming spatially responsive to what I was searching for in myself. Realistic self-portraits are dissolving into surreal and abstract backgrounds, which create a polar opposition between abstraction and figuration. My forms and brush marks are evolving to incorporate an abstract language where ideas and objects make a playful, arbitrary relationship to break their two-dimensional painting convention, and where the subject matter could be a reason for the colors and forms to live in a spontaneous coexistence. This existence reflects a dissolution and fragility of my ties to collective people and places. My aesthetics harness the meditative, and revolve around a sense of simultaneous awakening and entering deeper into a dream for the purpose of cultivating, evoking, experiencing, remembering, transforming, and communicating beauty. This process feeds back into my identity and the perception of the people and life that surrounds me.