My project-based artworks engage an analytical eye on the environment and our connections to it. Within a variety of constructs, my work of how we perceive and incorporate mediated landscapes in art have been formed by examining and representing nature intersecting with nostalgia, history and memoir.
The latest series Blink use still photographs of wildlife from an outdoor camera in the Hudson Valley as their source recording largely unseen wildlife that share my surroundings. These animals include deer, foxes, birds, bobcats, bees, and racoons. The strobe’s distorted lens in darkness, a flash of light illuminating their presence, suggests an other-worldly primitive snap of time. The Creation series, also paintings on canvas, were first inspired by Tintoretto’s The Creation of the Animals. My paintings abstracted forms of objects and animals, allude to Tintoretto's painting with its frenetic energy, exaggerated expression and color.
Paintings on panels and works on paper in Almost New and Arrivals were created by rolling paint and linear marking. Layers and repetition of color form planar surfaces. The series were completed during the pandemic and during a time of health crisis, the works reflect repetition, chaos and also forms of nature.
In Road Trip and Traffic/Landscape on Steel I painted bucolic landscape from the vantage point of a car driving down highways, the oil-painted images skewed and merged onto metal detritus such as car door panels, shaping playful wall-sculptures. Meadowlands uses the same imagery painted in oil from life and also from a corresponding satellite view. These landscapes addressed private and personal vantages through source images collected from Google Earth along with my own photographs.
An oil painting series on canvas and paper, Suburbs, Cemeteries and Thoroughfares and the series Pearlbrook Drive fuse imagery of my hometown from memory with newly-taken photographs, attempting to make sense of the confluence of time and distance.
Screen Memories is comprised of images painted on panels of perforated steel, and charcoal drawings, using family photographs from my grandparent’s vacation in the Austrian Alps before World War II; the historical photographs were matched with current Google Earth views from these same locations.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey with parents who were recent refugees from Shanghai and Vienna. In 2023 I became a dual US and Austrian citizen. I live and work in New York City and the Hudson Valley and am a Professor of Art at Pace University in New York City.
Link to discussion with Kathy Butterly from Road Trip Exhibition at George Adams Gallery on April 5, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-8te4dQv5I