Artist Statement I have expressed my life, feelings, and emotions through art since I was a young child.

Having a learning disability and struggling with reading and writing my whole life gave me a greater passion and love I have for art. I used finger paintings to communicate with my parents when the words wouldnt come out of my mouth, or grab trash and turned them into little sculptures. Art was, for the beginning of my life, the only form of communication I had with the world around me. After a lifetime of mastering this form of communication, I now hope to bring that appreciation and perspective to the world around me through my art. As an Interdisciplinary artist, I am an artist who links art and life together and therefore motivated by my everyday surroundings. The scope of my subjects is diverse in pursuit of artistic experiments that intersect with the realms of inter-media such as photography, video, sculptural installation, painting, and drawing. I believe colors, textures, lights, shadows, materials, sounds, etc. can produce a desired meaning or effect to a certain piece. Conceptual process conjures up and illustrates the complexities, of and about society, community, and a step inside the mind of the artist. I frame these explorations through the looking glass of tradition, self-expression, and the body of its surroundings. As my hybrid practice grows, the instrumentation of my song grows in complexity and expresses more vividly my intentions. Combining fields of painting, sculpture and installation, my work emphasizes process in terms of creativity, production, collaboration, and attempts to approach an understanding of context in any given environment. Its primary characteristic is that I see production as a process of putting myself in a particular place, and then understanding it. I believe that art is a form of research. This field of study not only encompasses the materials and process of creating art, but is the pursuit fundamentally releasing ourselves from imaginative and creative constraints. Art should be both provocative and thought provoking in ways that open up the viewers mind to new possibilities. I feel nourished by my current work, and plan to continue developing projects that will help promote the understanding of arts place in the field of academia.