Artist’s Profile – Arts Gowanus

Artist Statement: My paintings are collisions of queer, diasporic experiences and ecstatic desires. Mythic bodies dive through, push, and hold up the rectangle. They are slick, diaphanous, partial, chunky, Other—they exist in fluid exchange with the environment, rejecting the Western aesthetic division between abstraction and figuration. I embed the smell of marigolds, the swift temperature change of the California desert, or the thick haze of a three a.m. dance floor make-out. At times, I search for the painting through my body: I press, rub, and scratch, my actions becoming form-events. I work with recurring figurative shapes. The inverted triangle diver is, in part, my response to painted bathers. My divers are in motion, muscular and gender-fluid. The diver is a site of projection, a shape, a metaphor and the thing itself. At the core of my fixation is the diver’s suspension in the moment between ground and abyss, stand and submergence, knowing and not-knowing.