PORTALS

This series focuses on invented spaces. Each exists in its own world, yet they share a sense of cave-like logic and materiality. The worlds have their own laws of nature, patterns encouraged and broken. The rules are inflicted and disobeyed in the pursuit of replicating a life-like hypocrisy. Balance sits beside disorder, gravity with weightlessness, rigid frames are subverted and contradictions rule supreme. This routine of pattern making and breaking becomes the basis for world building in each piece. 

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Many of the works in this series are made on oak kitchen cabinet doors, while others are on second-hand frames. These are particularly intriguing as substrates for my work because of their common role in the home. I often imagine these surfaces as they would have existed in the home for years and years. I picture the hours of conversational sound waves reflecting off their surface, the times where they were bumped, knocked, spilled on—lived on. Each time leaving small but significant memorials to life—craters on the surface of a moon orbiting around a bright, turbulent planet. In this way each of these pieces is a small portal into that world. I urge the viewer to take a moment of stillness in which they can envision survival, even life among the chaos and beauty of each landscape. The recognition that in our own world, patterns become rules and the landscape is often a reflection of its damage: the necessary by-product of life.