ARTIST STATEMENT

  Growing up, my mother took me to church and my father to the gym/dojo. Religious and martial arts practice doubly built a sense of discipline, integrity, and resilience. Moreover, my trials and tribulations relative to training and fighting, taught me the importance of confronting oneself as a catalyst for evolution. My late teens and adulthood would bring fights my way outside of the gym/dojo. Those fights, like dealing with the loss of some of my closest friends, would cause me to develop an understanding of fighting as a concept that all human beings deal with in some way, shape, or form.

My drawing and painting practice examines issues of race, inequity, economic deprivation, the mundane, and hysteria relative to America’s socio-political landscape. Through abstraction, representation, and the space in between, I explore the phenomenological aspects of violence and the moments of peace/balance that exists therein, fueled by my twenty-nine years of experience as a martial artist and upbringing in an urban environment. Abstraction has formed a vehicle for recollecting my experiences as a fighter, and placing me in a position that I could not occupy at the time of those encounters; the spectator. The broader view of the spectator, when combined with that of the participant, creates a space that can be explored in the moments I revisit representation. Overall, we all function in life as combatants who fight for and/or against something.

The most critical of these battles is the one that takes place inside us daily when we reflect on how our experiences have affected us throughout our lives. Surface, color, gesture, and symbolism work together to traverse the territory where the effects of our lived experiences and societal conditions, collide with their causes.