STATEMENT

Le Corbusier said that “the only way to truly understand something is to draw it”. This is the center of my work—an attempt to sincerely grasp what I see through the tip of a pencil and a piece of charcoal. 

My practice focuses on the idea of portraiture as a radical act of empathetic connection. Inspired by the depth and breadth of human experience, I strive to explore the personal and societal histories etched in the world around me. Through the tip of a pencil and the bristles of a paintbrush, my portraits examine questions of truth, power, historical amnesia, and the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective pasts. My practice is centered on the belief that portraiture can be a kind of magic: In the face of immense difficulty, it somehow holds the power to connect us, building emotional bridges between humans across chasms of time, distance and individual experience.

My process is inherently about labor, and against the modern backdrop of instant, image-driven gratification, I have found the physical process involved in the painstaking, craft-driven rendering of a subject or a moment to be ever more important. The drawings are re-contextualizations of archival historical material, and walk the line between describing a shared, forgotten history and prophesying a terrifying, Orwellian future. I am fascinated with the way our societal amnesia is such that we have entirely lost touch with events that should have been indelibly burned into our collective, cultural psyche. While the works come directly from actual recorded moments, they create a dizzying sense of dreamlike dislocation — are the images real? A dream? It is this tension between imagination and reality; actual past and possible future that I wish to explore.

Image courtesy of Shaun Roberts