AIA Award & Application

I create paintings that confront our society’s obsession with consumption and waste. My surreal compositions and vibrant colors attract viewers, while the brashness of my brushstrokes and subject matter create a foreboding atmosphere. I have eliminated all remnants of natural landscapes and organic life and fore the viewer to face the ugly sides of humanity. I begin each painting with a particular color or sky in mind and abstractly create shapes and continue building upon those shapes until I have translated them into recognizable subjects that we all consume. While we are all aware f our growing waste problem I want people to be more aware of how much closer to home it exists and how small changed can help to prevent cataclysmic events. I hope my paintings motivate others to be mindful of purchases, to grow aware of the garbage they are producing, and to implement gradual lifestyle changes.

What future direction do you envision your art taking?

I plan on continuing to make these paintings until our society begins taking greater actions to solve this issue. My most anticipated goal it to create a book of prints containing this series so that more people can help support and promote the message without having to break the bank by buying a large painting. Creating this book will allow me to reach a wider audience by making it more accessible and affordable. It is easy to transport and flip through so that multiple people and families will be able to appreciate the series in its entirety in their won home. This book can be used as a reminder s to why we try harder and what we don’t’ want to happen. When creating this book, I plan to use a local printing company who is able to print on recycled paper in order to have the processes of making the book follow the same ethics. With the sales of this book, I will donate a percentage back to local organizations who are in the fight against climate change.

How would you use this award to move toward this vision of future direction in your work?

As an artist in Cincinnati, I feel this art is imperative to motivating people to think greener and cleaner, which not only keeps our city beautiful, but it furthers Cincinnati as a role model to all cities in the Midwest and beyond. Other cities will see Cincinnati supporting artists who fight for a cause and that will encourage even more artists and like-minded thinkers to the area, furthering Cincinnati’s progress. This award will allow me to create a book of prints that will convey my message wholeheartedly by being printed with sustainable materials. This award will not only allow me to fund the production of the book, but it will lower the retail cost. I want to make this book as affordable as possible while also donating a percentage back to local organizations. By fitting the entire collection into a tangible book, I will be more likely to effect a wider range of people, who will be able to use the book as a reminder to make lifestyle changes. They will be able to appreciate each painting without having to break the back on just one. I would like to organize a clean ups and collaborate as a community be maintaining focus on fixing our consumption issue and this award with help me fulfill those goals. It takes the entirety of a community to make big changes and I hope my artwork can be a force that gets people moving. This award will greatly enhance my opportunity to alter places where our city needs improvement. I want to be a part of a generation that makes real change, and I hope my work continues to inspire the generations to come. Perhaps one day my work will be a reminder of how things used to be and what could have been. Thank you for your consideration!

My currect printings are based on animal life, primarily birds I’ve observed on the small farm where I live outside of Cincinnati. Een though birds are abundant and common, they often go unnoticed. As an aartist, I’m intrigued by the immense range of their patterns, textures, colors and shapes.

Unlike humans, birds spend nearly their entire lives in the air; I think of them as messengers between the common and the etheral–liaisons between the earth and sky. Aside from depicting their physical beauty, I try to convey the relationship humans have with birds. By making them larger than life, I accenturate their larger-than-life qualities: vitality, grace, curiosity, fierceness, beauty and intelligence. The textured backgrounds of my work reflect the animals’ environments, memories and dispoitions. I sometimes include pages from books or other ephemera to reinforce the theme of birds as messengers.

In experimenting with the size of my bird paintings, I discovered they have a different visual impact when on a monumental scale. No longer just a finely detailed decorative object, the bird’s heroic size visually confronts and arrests the viewer, requiring time to obvserve and process.

To create my paintings, I begin with large boards, to which I apply acrylic paint to form faux textures or patterns. I then cut them into smaller pieces of varuous sizes. Some are hand-painted or stenciled to resemble faded wallpaper, wood, stone and other textures. I assemble these pieces into a collage to form the background for the final painting. Intially, I draw the primary image on an acetate overlay. Once I’m happy with the drawing, I tranfer it to the background and develope the composition using wax pastel and paint.

What future direction do you envision your art taking?

I am excited to continue expanding this series. Of all the work I’ve done over the years, the bird “portraits” have garnered the most interest. The monumental birds have been especially popular and have attracted a following in public spaces such as restaurants and galleries where people have time to ponder and enjoy them. My plan is to create more of these large-scale works from my observations and from further research. I never tire of observing birds and expressing their individual spirts in my work. Crafting the elaborate backgrounds inspired by their unique characteristics is challenging and draws upon my extensive design background and continuing research.

How would you use this award to move toward this vision of the future direction of your work?  

The monumental bird series is more costly to produce and more time-consuming than any previous work I’ve done. I would use an award from Summerfair to pay for direct costs such as paint and materials. The framing costs for such large pieces are also a major expense to condiser. Additioinally, the money would help defray the costs of shipping such large pieces to galleries in other cities.

If budget allows, I would like to expand my knowledge of bird morphology by examining the taxidermy collections at the Field Museum in Chicago and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

All of this time and activity would be geared toward obtaining future exhibitions to share my work with the public.

My work of the past few years is a series of multifaceted installations that explore the relationships between physical environments and the psychological experience of those spaces. Landscape is a shifting concept defined and redifined by the culture and time that experiences them. The politics of visual culture expand as we experience the trauma and sublimity of our world amplfied by our media culture. In my work motifs of mirrors, picture frames and glass dones to reference the mediation that occurs between looking and distilling a memory. Through these mid-19th century era domestic objects, I draw a connection to the Hudson River School and their use of the”Claude glass” mirror to compose an idealized landscape. The body of work uses shadow and projection as a priamary element concerning itself with the ephemera and the moment. I pull from a wide array of traditional and non-traditional media including roofing paper, 3D printing, silhouette cutting, glass kiln casting, audio, and video projection. The projections and shadows create layered wall collages that amplify the scale of the shadows. These shadow installations reference existing places and draw inspiration from the view outside my southern Ohio studio window. Minature sculptures of cell towers, factory incinerators and other stuctures of current and post technologies cast large shadow collages that move and shft on kinetic bases. These juxtapositions of scale, shadow and image raise questions of history, labor and technology as well as the environment in which they exist.

What future direction do you envision your art taking?

In my future work, I am planning on addressing both scale and physicality by creating a series of cast sculptures using paper pulp. I have begun casting stumps of trees that have been felled due to blight from the Emerald Ash Borer. I have been using local woods whose ash tree population has been eviscerated by the emerald ash borer, as an outdoor studio documenting the felled trees and taking casts. From these local woods to the pine forests to the north whose climate is getting wetter and warmer in recent years, I am interested in documenting these trees in a new project entitled ” Ghost Grove”. Along with casting tree stumps in paper, I have purchased a drone and am taking aerial footage of these forests. As I work through this new chapter, I hope to use the footage with the cast suclptures in a new installation.

How would you use this award to move toward this vision of the future direction of your work?

I would use the grant to support my studio practice throught the purchase of materials and services, as well as setting up my studio to be a more efficient paper casting space as I work more large-scale. In addition to purchasing materials for casting, I will use funds for local and regional research in support of my subject. I will continue to travel to local forests, but I will expand my range looking at regional forests which have been affected by blight as well as documenting some of the last virgin pine forest in UP Michigan and document the spaces with my drone footage.