The works in my current series are intimately shaped by my meditations upon the performative nature of gendered behavior and the body as spectacle.

In both the paintings involving breakage of the support surface and the closely related polyptych series I have chosen to portray the sense organs as prominently absent, re-working a series of personal photographs cropped in ways which interrupt the ordinary conception of the body's skin as an uncrossable boundary. At once connected and disconnected, the bodies in these images dissolve into abstract geometric shapes, icons standing in for an actual touch, even as the works themselves stand in for bodies in close proximity to one another, making literal the tension between the psychological desire of the human mind to communicate its own sense of self and the physical limits of the individual body.

The semi-dissolved figures in my most recent pieces similarly emphasize the idea of the body as an ephemeral shell which is in constant flux—a porous membrane through which materials pass and connect the mind to the external world—while also continuing the long tradition of viewing an image of the body as an instantiation of the self. The modern human body, altered by surgical procedures and obscured by fashion, is in some ways the ultimate work of art as it is also the apotheosis of the self—a simulation which each individual creates by their lived experience. In this series I portray the feelings of futility that come along with the constant battle to create, to communicate. The intertwined bodies grope and taste blindly in a way that is less sensual than it is a call to question the nature of embodiment. The shattered vision of a body or bodies interrupted in moments of extremity makes literal the tension between the desire to communicate an authentic self and the physical limits of the individual body, relative to other bodies. The viewer, perhaps seeing themselves reflected in the glossy surface of the final layer, is shown something that is less a moment than the amalgamation of sense perceptions that is the self.