I am a surrealist painter and assemblage artist from Detroit. I grew up learning art from my mother who is a professional painter. I attended Adrian College on a fine arts scholarship, and then left everything behind to move to San Francisco, where I lived for 9 years. There, I pursued a solo career in music, and released multiple albums. I also continued making visual art on the side. Since moving back to Michigan in 2011, I have focused on painting and assemblage work. I also a member of the Detroit punk band MACHO.
There’s a certain feeling that lies somewhere between nostalgia, déjà vu and longing, which I have no word for, but have been attempting to capture my whole life. A moment when time’s forward rush suddenly becomes a still pool, and some looming truth about our existence seems a closer than usual. And then it’s gone. These moments seem to happen most in the late afternoon when the world tilts and shadows spill down the streets. The scenes I try to create in my work are meant to transport me, and hopefully others, into these fleeting moments.
The bleak landscapes of late-stage capitalism urban sprawl seem particularly thick with these feelings. The skeletal giants of electrical towers, the tombstone-like small industrial buildings which stand one after another down numbered streets, and the scorched trees by the highway. I often set my work in these landscapes. I view my work as surrealism. It is my own commentary on the human condition, and our current time in history.
Reality is by nature metaphysical, surreal. It is equal parts fact and fantasy. We travel through it in our tangible body and experience it in the intangible and abstract realm we call The Mind. Humankind has been attempting to explain the How and Why of reality with art since the beginning of recorded time, and I am no different.
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