PLURALITY

My artwork centers on themes of plurality, the one and the many.

In my solo painting, individual strokes build up to create masses of forms, and individual laser-cut tiles amass to create abstracted visions of the natural world.

In my social practice work, I facilitate artworks with people who are impacted by the harmful institution that is mass incarceration. In this role I am a facilitator or a producer, supporting students in making their visions come to life. This work is also deeply concerned with the one and the many, since society in the United States blames individuals for problems that are often actually systemic in nature. The violence present in our social systems is more difficult to see, and can’t be blamed on just one person.

In response to the ways incarceration divides us from one another, I’ve developed an artistic intervention that brings hundreds of voices together in a single painting. “Multi-vocal paintings” amplify the voices of diverse communities. Each artwork brings together artistic contributions from up to 200 people, using strategic design parameters to integrate participants’ wide range of visual styles into a unified whole.

Multi-vocal paintings celebrate a multiplicity of perspectives, and resist the notion that plurality might be consolidated into a singular view. Each artwork is a visible disruption of the Western world's emphasis on the isolated individual, which I've come to see less as a sign of freedom than a symptom of colonization.