lms@ucsd.edu
Biography:

Website: http://bridgethevoid.blogspot.com

Fancy talkin': I work primarily with fast, simple drawing, which I tend to think of as a reductive method: reducing figurative and symbolic forms to basic essences. I don’t think of the work as crude although it’s often labeled as such. I tend, on the other hand, to promote the idea of simplicity being both the power and the raw grace that enables drawing to affect its viewer. This concept arises out of a consideration of the sketchbook as a critical, dominant part of my creative practice. The work itself deals primarily with a dialectical tension between epiphanic moments and existential void space. My most recent show, entitled Bridge the Void, was simultaneously concerned with: the possibility that spiritual transcendence and upward social mobility are equally profound (and irreparably collided) cultural constructions or myths that in fact oppress (rather than liberate) those that subscribe to them; and that the notion of movement or progression through one’s existence is inseparable from metaphors of ascendance and verticality, metaphors which provide psychologically violent building blocks upon which only one thing can be built: hierarchical paradigms of power, exclusivity and ego-worship.

Plain talkin': I was born and raised in rural Illinois. I earned a BFA in Studio Art (graduating Summa cum Laude) and a BA in Art History from the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2004. I have lived, learned, loved and made drawings around Europe a whole bunch, where I hope to relocate to in the near future. In the meantime, I'm drawing more, growing beards, riding my motorpickle and lurking in LA, where I hope I to find my mythical "cheap warehouse" in which to live and work.