Alt Media

I draw a distinction between traditional 2-D media, the foundation of my practice and the area where I have the most skill, and alternative media, which I see as relying on the internet, public space, and digital technology. I acknowledge that I am often quite clumsy with these materials and use them in a fumbling way, but I also see them as necessary for accomplishing many of my goals as an artist such as engaging viewers in non-gallery settings and prompting social change.

I make a variety of alternative media works, including sound, video, performance, and public intervention. I consider all static art objects in my work as painting-adjacent, even when the work becomes 3 and 4 dimensional and made for a traditional gallery space. On the other hand, my alt media works begin as actions, spectacles, and interventions, which end up in online spaces.

Interventions

Beef Heart Ritual Spring 2025

In the Spring of 2025, I conducted a series of rituals during the San Marcos Studio Tour in which I placed beef hearts into a painting suspended from the ceiling of my studio space.

The ritual symbolized the relationship between 2-D image making, the decomposition and recomposition of the body through illness, and the possibility of community participation in healing and trauma processing. For each of the 4 days of the tour, I purchased a beef heart from my local grocer, HEB, and asked those present in my studio space to listen to prepared notes on the meaning of the ritual, then assist and/or witness the placing of the beef heart into the suspended painting and burial of the previous days beef heart. I cut a slit in the painting for each new beef heart, through which the flesh of the heart herniated, illustrating the close relationship between embodiment and image.

Collage Feedback Loop
With American Communal Industries

Organizations, institutions, and large groups of people function like biological organisms. Certain spaces, certain architecture, certain walkways are the appendages, sensing organs, heart, brain and eyes of systems, like the university. This collage project treats Texas State University's Fighting Stallions monument as a perceptual center of the school as a figurative organism. It is the eye of the system. It focuses our attention and directs us to contemplate particular information.

This project asks us to present data to this "eye" in a highly conscious way, as artists do when they observe the world. We break down the way data is input to the "eye" in 7 categories:

1. Sense

2. Observe

3. Perceive

4. Interpret

5. Judge

6. Fear

7. Imagine

We generate imagery and/or text for each category, accumulating information in the form of drawings, writings, pictures, and collage in long, nerve like tendrils that extend from the "eye's" center. This process helps to slow down and evaluate the flow of information to the university organism as well as our position within it.

The resulting collage is a physical data document or record of slower, more thoughtful data flowing around the perceiving organs of the university body.

Data will remain anonymous.

Data will be fed through ai chats prompted to process all incoming data as sensory, observational, perceptual, interpretive, judging, fearing, or imagining inputs and processed as such. We will evaluate the final state of each chat at the end of the collage exercise.

Photography by Konstantin Belyshev

Sound

It was Taylor Swift’s folklore era. It was Covid. I was in this mass internet consciousness with everyone, exploring the culture, ideas, politics, experience, remotely, isolated in the country, house sitting for my mom, taking care of pets, working for a likely mentally ill man who ran a tinctures business and ran his family like a cult leader. I wanted to tell the story of this time, and used Taylor Swift as the vehicle for my own, sharply contrasted story.

Even in 2020, the cultural fascination with Taylor Swift had begun to reach a fever pitch. She was everywhere, beloved, threatening to go edgy but remaining sanitized. I noticed a duality in my personal reaction to her that made me want to make something. On the one hand, I wanted to give in to the fantasy and escape offered by her music, to identify with her and accept her. This was an escape from high brow to low brow art, high culture to low culture, as much as appreciation for her music. It felt freeing to give in to the pop girliness, to admit I enjoyed her music more than going to galleries or being a weird serious disturbing artist. On the other hand, I felt skeptical of her sincerity. I'd heard all of the criticisms: "she never takes a political position, she's a white feminist, her art isn't very good or meaningful." I agreed with some if not all of them. I have a very hard time deciding to this day whether I believe Taylor Swift is a tru artiste.

As I tinkered with these ideas through aesthetic processes mostly involving voice memo recordings, Daylight emerged.

Daylight was originally a sound piece I composed during the fall of 2020. It still is not complete as of 2025. It is made from 1) a series of personal voice memos I never intended to share and 2) recordings of myself singing several Taylor Swift songs, the most prevalent of which is “Daylight,” from the 2019 album Lover. By singing her songs, I processed them through my own subjective experience, dissecting them and reassembling them with my personal voice memos until a sort of sound monster resulted. To me, the sound alone feels like a distorted vision of female experience that breaks apart through a process of recording, representation, mimicry, and splicing.

In late 2020, the piece morphed from sound to performance as I presented it Icosa Collective for the group performance show called Transmissions. I considered the work an "anti-performance" because I consciously did nothing I wouldn't normally do. In the gallery window, I vaped, wrote in my journal, worked on my lap top and listened to Taylor Swift's music while the sound piece was projected into the gallery entrance. I installed a series of Taylor Swift posters purchased from Wal-Mart in the gallery window, but that was the only visual other than my presence.

Following the performance, the piece morphed again from performance to video. I spliced sound, performance documentation footage, and iphone videos (most of which are me recording computer and TV screens while watching moves and shows, capturing images and ideas that interest and disturb me) in a rhythm to compose the final visual work. All sound and video are from a particular period from May 2020-January 2021.