Artist Statement

My work explores what happens to identity when the self becomes an image optimized for visibility.

I am interested in the private self becoming a public image. A person does not remain fixed across contexts. We shift in response to status, social circles, visibility, anonymity, desire, memory, influence, and the need for acceptance. Some parts of the self become amplified, toned down, protected, or discarded depending on the environment. Some traits are displayed vividly, while others are masked or walled off from the outside world. Yet the world still seeps in, with or without our consent.

In my drawings and paintings, figures move through physical and social environments that act on them psychologically. Coastlines, hotel rooms, markets, city streets, cafés, museums, patterned interiors, architecture, and landscapes are never simply backgrounds. They become fields of pressure — places where the figure is asked to perform, belong, appear, adapt, conceal, or become legible to others.

Pattern, repetition, travel, and the human figure allow me to investigate how identity is constructed, displayed, concealed, and changed. These elements function as metaphors for social and psychological pressure. A patterned room can become a mask. A travel setting can become a fantasy of self. A repeated surface can become a social code. A composed pose can signal confidence, but it can also become armor. The figure is not merely placed in the world; the world acts on the figure, and the figure changes the emotional charge of the setting in return.

I think of the self as relational, like color: changed by what surrounds it and changing what surrounds it in return. Josef Albers’s work helps clarify this idea: hue does not exist in isolation, but shifts according to what surrounds it. Identity behaves similarly. As pattern, architecture, landscape, and image culture shift, the figure shifts with them. The exchange is reciprocal: the person leaves a residue in the environment, altering its mood, meaning, and psychological atmosphere.

Repetition allows me to study these changes. A repeated figure, pose, place, field, or pattern can reveal what shifts and what remains. Across a series, the figure may blend into the field, perform for it, resist it, dissolve into it, or become more image-like. Repetition turns experience into evidence. It shows identity not as fixed essence, but as something reorganized by context.

My work is moving toward abstraction because abstraction allows the figure and environment to act on each other more directly. Pattern can attract the eye, but it can also conceal, mask, and absorb. Color can alter mood, behavior, and character. A person can begin to dissolve into the very surfaces that make them visible.

In the AI age, this question feels especially urgent. As images become increasingly editable, repeatable, optimized, generated, and circulated, identity becomes more vulnerable to being treated as a surface. A face can become a prompt. A person can become an output. The self can be smoothed, stylized, repeated, and rewarded until the manufactured image begins to feel more legible than the person beneath it. My work does not illustrate artificial intelligence directly; instead, it asks what remains human when identity is shaped by the systems that display, circulate, and validate it.

My process begins with observation: drawings of figures, landscapes, architecture, objects, interiors, clothing, and travel fragments. I combine, compress, repeat, abstract, dissolve, and rebuild these elements until the image is no longer simply descriptive. I remove details that feel incidental and preserve the elements that carry pressure: gesture, gaze, pattern, pose, place, posture, and emotional contradiction. Through this process, the image becomes a site of exchange between the private self and the social field.

Ultimately, my work asks what happens to the private self inside the social field. What do we perform for belonging? What do we sacrifice for validation? What parts of us remain, intensify, or disappear when visibility, place, social pressure, image culture, and artificial systems begin to shape who we become?