More often than not, I see a disconnection between people and myself as if there’s a wall between us. Differences in interpersonal experiences, empathy, and associations drive home a sense of isolation that I’m invested in practicing in my oil paintings and my sculptures. Coming from a deeper curiosity on how we interact with our environment, I use architecture as one of my tools to explore the psychology behind our settings and to demonstrate uncanny detachment. I also utilize our shared understandings of furniture and domestic spaces to build analogies.

          Taking references from my own exposures, I paint a reimagined world designed to reflect ambiguous disconnections. These oil paintings give snapshots into dream-like sets of interior and exterior spaces that are familiar enough to be drawn in yet altered to discomfort. Picturing figures and subjects in distant perspectives, unnatural lighting, and recomposed architecture, these elements are intermixed to elude themes in alienation, entrapment, and dissonance. Wood panels are mostly used in my process to have a solid base texture that is then drawn over followed by mineral spirit-rich layers of oil paint. These surfaces are later painted with and without mineral spirits to build a final thin layer of pigment.

          In my sculptural practice, I grab the viewers’ attention by presenting found objects in abnormal states. These objects are prominently furniture pieces and other household bits to take advantage of our common familiarity and understandings of domestic items. Deconstructed, destroyed, or manipulated to personify experiences that involve themes in structure, influence, and purpose. Through this process, I’m translating the internal, abstract condition into an external, physical analogy.

          My body of work involves manipulating commonly understood elements around us to study our connections with them and use them as devices to communicate our relationships. While this is manifested fluidly in my paintings and more physically in my sculptures, my practice takes account of how we interact with places, people, and objects, to exhibit the human condition from the perspective of disconnections.