Solo Exhibition

From the Ground, Up

I’ve always considered myself a homebody, but in truth, much of my adult life has been nomadic. Like many people, the variety of places I’ve lived has been near panoramic, from a garage studio in California, to a pine paneled room in Norway, to every iteration of apartment in Chicago and New York. Perhaps the immediate impulse to personalize my living spaces provided enough continuity to create a self perception more domestic than my history attested. In any case, this impulse offered a counterpoint to my peripatetic existence. Driven by the search for something, be it skill, opportunity, or fullness, the actual constant was movement.

I was born and raised in California but I spent at least part of each summer in the Midwest. My Mom’s family is from Kansas City and every time I left I had a deep longing for its intimate hedgerows and big skies. During the pandemic, when I landed in the old familial lake cabin, that I visited while growing up, the decision to permanently relocate was an obvious one. My roots here are deep and I have found the landscape of my heart. That nomadic tendency has abated, the stillness now allowing for the growth I once found only in movement. The natural world—its cycles, its patterns, its fields and gnarled trees—is the wellspring for my current body of work.

Two figures continually appear in these images, that of myself and that of my dear friend, Lissa. We have known each other a long time, having met when we lived in the Bay Area. Lissa and I reconnected in entirely serendipitous circumstances, having each independently moved to Missouri in 2020. As our friendship deepened, so did my relationship to the land and my perception of this place I call home. This body of work takes our likenesses to explore different aspects of life in Missouri, from post-Roe trigger bans to the softness of a more earth-based lifestyle.