Bio:
I am an artist currently living, working, and teaching in Southern California. I received my BFA from the University of Northern Iowa in 2010 with an emphasis in ceramics, and my MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2019 with an emphasis in printmaking. Though my work pivoted away from ceramics shortly after my BFA, the values of craft, form, & process that I learned there have remained foundational components of my work ever since.
After UNI, my transition into printmaking took about 5 years. I spent a couple of years finding a foothold in new (mostly old) processes; and then spent a few more years making art and working side jobs before eventually landing in graduate school at CSU Long Beach in 2016. It was there that I started using digital fabrication techniques to explore print as a subject rather than a mechanism for producing images. I have been teaching a variety of courses at CSU Long Beach since graduating in 2019, while simultaneously (sometimes feebly) maintaining a private studio practice.
Artist Statement:
My current body of work is focused on the processes, tools, and choreographies of traditional printmaking and how those traditional processes inform modern technologies and methods of production. I am interested in examining the tension and collision between the use of modern materials and installation strategies when representing historical technologies. In this collision, I lend a reverence and preciousness to a specialized field which is often opaque to those outside it, and commonplace to those within it.
I have heard it said that when a commercial process becomes obsolete, it becomes an art process; The body of work I am currently working in highlights the deep and inseparable influence historical processes have on their contemporaries. History is never obsolete when its impact is fully appreciated.
Traditional lithography, engraving, Japanese woodblock printing, even the production of paper are achievements which held for generations without modification. The modern counterparts to these modes of production have deeply inherited the elegance and nuance of their predecessors. With the processes as the central focus, the work unites consideration of the images and surfaces with the actions and objects which caused them.