I am an artist, sculptor, filmmaker, and animator. I am invested in exploring how art and animation can address political inquiries and concerns, create stories of resistance, and ignite cultural and societal discourse and progress. This investment takes many forms, both digital and analog: sculptural pieces, stop-motion, 2D, and 3D animation.

 

My work is absurd, surreal, and perverse. There is an inherent narrative that infuses the sculptural objects that I make. With references to myth and allegory, my work allows me to express my sense of humor, my sarcastic nature, and my overall disdain for the corrupt nature of the hierarchical structure of systemic power. I come from the world of film and animation, where, although often pursued, it is tough to ignore narrative. With sculptural pieces, the narrative becomes more subdued yet precise, with each piece becoming a tableau.
 

While the pieces are taking form, a story tends to come out through the process. They become individual stages of theatre, a captured moment in time, or a single frame of a film, removed from the flat surface of the screen and transplanted into our world. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle-class ethics, I create work through labor-intensive processes that can be seen as overtly personal ceremonies.
 

The work is inundated with bad jokes, clichés, and blatancy. By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humor, and allegory, the pieces can be seen as self-portraits that reflect the implications of American social and cultural hegemony. My work often references George Bataille’s concept
of the “Acéphale” or the headless man. It has been a cornerstone to my path of confronting the consistent class warfare that weaves through American society and the hierarchy of power that sustains the continued systemic oppression brought on by this concentration of power and wealth.
 

This begins by looking inward—a critique of myself and my place in this environment. Using examples from my own experiences, my films have focused on a variety of subject matters, from growing up in rural America, the scars of addiction that lie upon my family, and the generational trauma of poverty and aspiration for class mobility. From the self, I build on my criticism and look more broadly at how these things permeate our culture, and how the Eugenics craze of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created a scientific foundation for othering minorities and the poor, how science and technology are tools of control.
 

My current project, El Vergonzoso, is a black comedy-fantasy stop-motion animated film and multimedia project. It follows a man as he is strung along by a group of pig oligarchs who utilize rhetoric to create their Manchurian candidate. Ultimately, it is a film that I am asking the specific question of how people who are like me, who grew up in the same part of the country as I, who have a similar experience, can be consumed by consistent hateful rhetoric. This rhetoric births such anger and disdain for anyone not in lockstep with their worldview that all others are inferior, and all criticism is an attack
directly on their personhood. From this perspective, I am looking inward and asking, Am I different? And if I am, why?
 

My goal has always been to challenge the status quo, to challenge myself and rethink who I am, and to use this reassessment to look outward and engage directly with society and culture with art as my tool of expression and resistance.