My life as an astronaut.

My work grew out of a desire to abandon the fetish object and embark on a journey into geometric abstraction. I began with a desire to pair the disparate elements of intellectual (sometimes pretentious) modernist abstraction with the perceived low brow ignorance of commercial painting and construction. I set up a number of contradictions including, but not limited to, painting without paint, high brow and low brow, intelligence and ignorance.

Within these contradictions I noticed a correlation between rationality and biological mechanisms. It is within human nature to impose our will upon the world. In doing so, we build monuments and cities that show our greatness. However the greatness being shown is actually just a division of labor. It is the working class and the poor who are supporting those few at the top. So the intelligent, educated and intellectual class structure use the more "primitive" working class to do their bidding.

The system is set up to keep the rich rich and poor poor. I find myself between the two. I come from working class, poor family. We are fairly uneducated. I am one of a few in my entire extending family to go to college. I have been given the opportunity to get a MFA. I feel an overwhelming amount of guilt that I get an attempt to intellectualize myself and change my social status, while my family remain where they have always been. It sets up an internal conflict that I struggle with on an hourly basis.

My work reflects those roots. Pairing the construct with the intellect. The cube represents a utopian ideal. In the Renaissance, linear perspective was the most logical and rational form to organize a painting. In my pieces, I set up illogical associations with deliberately out-of-perspective cube. Warping the the sense of Platonic Idealism that exists with the reality of how things are. These structures appeal to rational sense of organization while also triggering this biological need to feel uncomfortable. The viewer should feel uneasy. They have an internal conflict to intellectualize what the work is about or to avoid it because of the fear that the object may fall upon them.