Using mark-making and erasure, I source news broadcasts and trace histories to draft worlds within worlds. Each image represents movement through time and space, like film frames on celluloid, and each drawing alludes the temporal horizon. Acid Rain Blockchain explores how technology and the mediated image are tethered, transmitted, and received - perceptions changing from viewer to receiver.
Since the Steam Age, the pervasive evolution of technology and fossil capital has forced us into a data and tracking epoch. Amidst an endless blockchain infrastructure and attention economy, can we begin to perceive that another world is possible?
I am interested in how ideas are initially shaped through visual culture, then imbued into political rhetoric, and eventually larger societal feedback loops. By editing vast imagery together and juxtaposing formal elements with hand-rendered works, I allow the process to unfold, much like a novel. Landscapes take shape and narratives are forged.
How can one witness these constellations of power, and once witnessed, can reframing and montage be tools to dismantle them? The liberation of this expansive riddle lies in its totality — is there a canary in the coal mine?
Wind Challenge 2024 Exhibition Statement, April 2024.
Images 1 and 4 courtesy Jamie Alavrez
Works:
Acid Rain Blockchain, Installation, Charcoal on paper, black paint, 36' x 8”, 2024.
A Labyrinth In The Form Of A Sigil, Digital video, CRT TV, 35 minutes and 48 seconds, 2024.
A Sphere Is A Plurality Of Events, Flex Seal flood tape, box fan, air filters, duct tape, scrap wood, rubber tool dip. 50" x 20" x 20”, 2024.
Established in 1978, the Wind Challenge is an annual juried competition committed to featuring the work of exceptional artists living in the Philadelphia region. The 2024 Wind Challenge is juried by James Britt and Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño. The series is made possible thanks to generous support from the Wind Foundation.
Fleisher Art Memorial was Founded in 1898, and is one of the country’s oldest nonprofit community art schools and are committed to advancing the vision of our founder, Samuel S. Fleisher, who believed that art is one of society’s greatest assets and equalizers, and from the doorway of his Graphic Sketch Club, “invited the world to come and learn art.”