Two main interests have occupied my thinking as an artist: space and narrative. In looking to Early Renaissance and Chinese painting, Cezanne, and Cubism, I sought to break from a single point-of-view and began using a grid in which subtle shifts occurred from one scene to another. I drew upon personal memories and events to create fictionalized scenarios situated in domestic architecture and the suburban landscape. Over time, these images lost their linear, geometric structure, and what emerged was a synthesis of various landscapes, architecture, objects, interiors, and weather.

Since the late 1990’s, Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque has deeply affected my work. In reading this text, Deleuze’s analysis called forth a new way of thinking about space and events, particularly in relationship to the metaphor of the fold. Leibniz’s ideas entail a move away from the Cartesian model of a geometrically mapped world to a more malleable and mutable conception of space. This parallels my interest in portraying a world that is not static and fixed, but one that encompasses movement in time and signifies shifts in thought and emotion.

In 2005, I began bending and folding the plane of the paper and investigating the ways in which the virtual images locate themselves within these real spaces.  Just as buildings are positioned within the landscape, I allow images to find their way into the folded and bended terrain of the paper. Moreover, with the juxtaposition of tiny forms to expansive spaces, they can only be experienced in a temporal manner. Like an unfolding in time, the result is an almost cinematic experience wherein one image or sequence yields to another.

My aim in drawing is to depict a psychological topography—one in which views proliferate and multiply, stretching and unfolding onto the surface of the paper, or, in counterpoint, folding back in on themselves. They create a purposefully disjointed narrative, fusing historical catastrophes with domestic interiors, postmodern architecture, and otherworldly landscapes. Through the careful blending of charcoal with delicate erasure, vignettes of diverse images and spaces are interwoven with each other, and the drawing seemingly emerges out of the paper.

These psychic narratives are based upon large political, environmental, or social events that have had an impact on our collective emotional landscape. Drawing upon these cumulative internal states, particularly with public tragedies such as 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, or events surrounding the Arab Spring, my images render complex visual reports that link personal experience with these disturbing, historical events and their concomitant ideas of hate, fear, and un-addressed grievances as well as rescue, hope, and salvation.

The drawings, with their spatial folds and bends that situate parallel worlds, contracted pasts, and potential events provide an alternate way for the viewer to experience a two-dimensional image; an image that embodies an uneven quality of space-time and that creates a psychological index of our age.

2011