Art Therapist Statement
I am a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Arts in Art Therapy and Counseling (MAATC. I completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2020. I am an interdisciplinary artist and emerging art therapist. My art therapy practice is person-centered and trauma-informed. I believes that the client is the best expert of themselves and their lived experiences should be honored with cultural sensitivity and humility. I offers care that is built on informed choice, consent and collaboration. I emphasizes the ongoing, ever-evolving relationship between our creative-self and the parts of ourselves that seek safety, freedom, agency and recovery. I recognizes the vital role that social justice initiatives play in the pursuit of equity with his clients, within the mental healthcare systems and beyond. My clinical experience includes practicing art therapy at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center (JBVA). At JBVA, I worked primarily with Veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, substance-use disorder, military sexual trauma, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression and anxiety. More recently, I practiced art therapy and talk therapy with adults with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) at the community-based non-profit Thresholds. At both JBVA and Thresholds, I has worked in 1:1 and group therapy settings.
Artist Statement
The process of art-making was born out as a desire demystify my experiences and to satisfy my need to physically engage different materials and create something that has a sensory impact on me. Through my graduate education, specifically my work in social linguistics and art therapy, my arts practice has evolved beyond acting solely as a mode of expression and instead acts as a container for metaphors that can build out registers of meaning, capable of engaging not only my personal experiences and aesthetic choices, but can also be in critical dialogue with, and responding to, larger issues around fine art, social justice and mental health.
Art-based Art Therapy Research
In You Can’t Unring a Bell (Video + 2 Channel Audio), I autoethnographically research the experience of ethically navigating self-disclosure between my art and art therapy practice. To research this, I completed the Bowen family therapy directive: the family genogram. I used my family genogram and the mental health information encoded within it, as a visual score to create a sonic family genogram. Abstracting that visual data into sound allowed me the opportunity to mitigate unethical personal disclosure while expressing my experience of existing within a family navigating generational trauma. I programmed You Can’t Unring a Bell using Max 8 software. Every oscilloscope represents a different family member, and they are all encoded with a unique oscillator (sound source) and are programmed to interact with each other in ways that represent the interrelational and mental health of my family as a whole. Though influences and connections are built into the programming, so too are stochastic occurrences of expression, relation, and impact.
A family genogram is a family tree-like visual chart encoded with symbols and markers that denote a therapeutic client's mental health and relational family history. You Can’t Unring a Bell: Redacted Genogram, is a redacted version of my family genogram. While it doesn’t contain the original's mental health data, it still demonstrates how symbol, shape, line, color, scale, and medium can effectively translate information if used as a mechanism for visually coding mental health indicators into the genogram.
You Can’t Unring a Bell: Gilded Genogram takes the concept of the Bowen family genogram and omits any indication of mental health imbalance and relational disorder in favor of symmetry and a sense of order. By gilding it, I intend to bring a sense of beauty and validation to the universal experience of living in a flawed family system. Like iconographic painting, I am using gold to elevate the representation of the subject matter.
You Can’t Unring a Bell: Gilded Oscilloscope is an enlarged analog of the digital oscilloscope in You Can’t Unring A Bell that represents me within my family system. At human scale, viewers are confronted with the grid, and its place in society.
I represented each family member with an oscillator in You Can’t Unring a Bell with a unique pitch, volume, timbre, and resonance to articulate my interpretation of them, individually and collectively. To further explore this, I wrote an extensive series of fictional dialogues called You Can’t Unring a Bell: Unspoken Conversations. These allowed me to move beyond antiquated and unfair family narratives and examine their lives with more insight, compassion, and care.
Artwork Statements
My Intimate Gold Works are intimate-scale gilded paintings intended to be held and carried, like a phone, tablet, or book. Unlike those objects, they engage the beholder with a sense of connection through serene stimulation, like a talisman, a charm, or a piece of jewelry.
I began making 8” x 8” paintings to process my experiences working at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center (JBVA) as an art therapist. I have continued this practice as a form of response art since. The small scale of the paintings allow them to be experienced and interacted with differently than larger works. These can be held, felt, moved and re-moved. They are all assembled, stretched, prepared and painted by hand. They are acrylic, flashe (vinyl emulsion paint), organic materials, and in some cases, 22k gold leaf. Though they are small, they have been labored over.
My acrylic and gold leaf Whisper paintings are a series of paintings based on the following poem which addresses intuition and loss: I whispered something to myself: time runs low. With swollen eyes and selfish lust, I whispered something to you: always morning. A deep glow locked in a minor key. You glanced at me with love in your eyes. Tell me what I can no longer see. Show me what I can no longer hear. My purples will always be bruised. My blues will eclipse my fear. You whispered something to me: wherever you are, I am.
My large-scale graphite paintings on panel and paper, Forever, Forever, are evidence of a meditative and durational state induced by a sense of isolation. The visual counterpart to a song with the same name, these suspended triangulations crystalize from repeating lines, modulating both toward and away from the viewer. The palimpsest of these works reveals a halo, created by my knees as I completed them on the studio floor. This halo holds the light that exposes the transition from the known to the unknown.
The Magician (series) explores the psychological negotiations that exist within the experience of human engagement through geometric interaction. Family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers can nourish, frighten, and validate us, justifiably or not, calling our humanness into question. When doubt arises, humans have often turned toward lore and the supernatural. The tarot magician accesses the directional metaphor, ascending upward toward something better, beyond the present, and inverts the directional metaphor, descending to the safety and certainty of the past.
Tripartite Series: “Sensitive to moves in Russian Suprematism, the Soviet avant-garde, the Bauhaus, and even the sigils and insignia of the Art Deco...a language of meaning based in geometries and symbols lacking verifiable history but bearing great weight nonetheless. These evocative graphics call to mind belief systems and orders not yet known, and so they also signal to subcultures in music & mysticism, from black metal to Masons. They communicate at first sight and haunt long after one has left them.” (Director of Arts Programming & Partnerships at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Frank Smigiel)
Eclipsing Royalty is a gilded iteration within a group of paintings attempting to counter fast consumer capitalism's momentum with slow and balanced precision. The use of gold leaf illuminates the teetering point of stability and also self-implicates its own role in systems of currency and exchange.
We Are All Born Diamonds interpret the complex psychospiritual integrations that are undertaken to reveal, confront, and relinquish the inauthentic-self created as a byproduct of escaping the generational feedback loop of trauma.
Under an Avalanche is an improvisational sound performance on a 100 year old piano that released unresolved patriarchal histories buried beneath hyper-masculine, heteronormative male identification. I sonically counter unwelcome, antiquated macho ideologies and tropes.
Transfer Attempts is a collection of sound art that was made in my home studio in Chicago, IL. using a limited palatte of technology: vintage “pro-sumer” tape machines (Tascam 388, Tascam 244, Tascam 414, Teac A6100, Teac 3340sx), analog tape delay/reverb (Re-201 Space Echo), analog synths (Juno-60, Prophet-10, Moog Dfam), computer/digital synths/effects (Korg monologue xd, Empress Reverb, Arturia modeling synths), and samples of (un)naturally occurring sounds.