For the past several years, I have sought though my work, to isolate imagery from the world around me- from birds on power lines and skeletal trees against the sky I saw on my commutes to work to broken bits of fence and tattered flags in a used car lot in my Chicago neighborhood.  I was simultaneously influenced by the natural world and silhouettes, silk-screened imagery on t-shirts in boutiques, tattoos and band tees on hipsters in Wicker Park.  

It took moving away from the large skies of Illinois, away from the consumer culture of Chicago, for me to realize that my artwork was (and is) a perpetuation of an already prevalent hipster aesthetic.  It was coming across a necklace on Etsy (a website for indie handmade goods) that closely resembled one of my paintings that brought this realization home.  That event was a catalyst for my most recent series of work, The Beautiful Ones.  

In these drawings and paintings (sometimes paired with t-shirts), I seek to understand the why behind hipster, rock kid, art kid- sanctioned images.  By focusing on animals, I have selected images that originate in nature.  I am interested not only in the preference of certain animals and imagery over others, but also in the process of appropriation---the distance that an animal must travel from its source in the wild, to its translation into slick silhouettes and layered silk-screened images, to its subsequent marketing and distribution; from an individual living creature to a ubiquitous symbol.

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Another go at a statement for this work for New American Paintings                                  Written May 08:

I am interested in the juncture between Design and Nature, specifically design that is meant to be consumed in the form of fashion, decoration, art, and music. Perhaps in today’s urban-influenced culture, in light of concerns about the environment and rapidly dwindling resources, people are changing their relationship to nature. More and more I am seeing wall-mounted decals of birds, silhouettes of tree branches on t-shirts, and artwork that seems to gravitate toward very specific animals and other natural imagery. There seems to be a collectively conscious move towards the flattening and codification of nature. 

In my current work I am exploring what makes certain of these images attractive to people such that again and again, they are appropriated--taken a very far distance from their original embodiment in the wild and presented as Design. Possibly this proliferation of slick, stylized natural imagery, even the trend of animal-named indie bands, is our culture’s way of connecting to nature when many people don’t interact with the natural world on a regular basis. The desire to surround oneself with representations of nature is certainly not a new phenomenon, but perhaps the present trend bears an urgency that makes such images as unsettling as they are attractive.