No Place Like Home

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…. I am adopted, which could explain my affinity for the found objects I use in my upcoming May showing in Hank & Dolly’s. Even as a child I imagined that every object, no matter how inanimate, had its own feelings, its own consciousness. There’s just something about the discarded, a lost history, an unknown meaning, and the act of recontextualizing them, giving them a new meaning, a use, a home, that I personally find very therapeutic.

My work is usually painting based, exploring different concepts surrounding the organic. However, behind-the-scenes of every painting endeavor was a collection of collages. They were a release for me. I could make small-scale, highly intimate works completely intuitively. And most appealing, I could keep all of them my little secrets, as simultaneously tragic and beautiful as they were.

As I began accumulating this work, my walls became covered in these emotionally charged pieces. At the time I considered them to be less serious than my paintings, but I still felt were highly important; they just couldn’t find a venue, they couldn’t find a home.

So, I sought to find a place to bring light to these highly patient, deserving works. No Place Like Home provides them with just that; a gallery setting where they can be seen, and thoughtfully examined. These works provide a direct look into my mind, and yet, as all art is, they are completely subjective, allowing the viewer to create their own meaning, to direct their own experience.

However, with that being said, I do hope that the viewer gives a second look to the materials in the work and draws the connection to the discarded and the decay that they pass by without much thought, let alone examination, on a regular basis. I hope they realize the beauty of these materials, of the mysterious beauty in the abandoned, of the beauty of time and weather taking their courses, altering objects. These are pages of a lost diary, relics of an unknown land.