I am from Western Pennsylvania. Growing up there in the 1990’s profoundly shaped what I find visually and conceptually compelling. It was a boom time for much of America, but not in and around Pittsburgh. Industries, labor unions, and communities were being hollowed out. The relationship between geography, the built environment, economies, and culture are central themes in my work. I emphasize these connections by referencing areas with histories of urban redevelopment, economic segregation, natural resource extraction, and subsidized suburban development. I have been in Minnesota for three years now and while I am settled and at home, I often feel like an interloper in this landscape. I am a person that likes to feel a deep connection to a place. I have always made work to try to understand the world better. The work I make now is a visual representation of my struggle to get my head around my current environment while longing for the geographies of my past.

Printmaking is my preferred medium because of its history of reproduction, appropriation, and dissemination. It allows me to both create and appropriate didactic forms. I don't edition my work very often, instead I use printmaking matrices over and over again in different combinations, and contexts to create one of a kind prints. I particularly like making collagraph prints, a type of intaglio print made from mat board, paper, knives, shellac and a lot of time. I started making these over a decade ago because at the time I could not afford the copper used to make a traditional intaglio plate. They make a mark like nothing I have ever seen before. I combine collagraph with other printmaking processes, where I take specific geographical data, chew it up, filter it, and make more and more opaque what data is being referenced and what conclusions are being drawn. I have a particular interest in the translation errors and systemic breakdowns that occur when filtering imagery between digital and analog production methods.

Context and process are more important than conclusions. My work is looking for answers but ends up being more comfortable with questions. It is a warning against certainty and trust in systems, a call to bring a skeptical eye to neat and tidy solutions, and an invitation to collectively question culture.