About the Artist

I have always been fascinated with the intersections between art and play, and the ability of both to blend the real with the fantastic. Art making helped me physically and mentally escape the constricting confines of suburban southern california. In my past work I have created surrealistic paintings where imaginary friends join me to process complex feelings such as growing up.

in my recent work, I create figurative paintings, sculptures, performances, and films that interrogate social norms and bring liberatory worlds of queer joy and expression to the fine arts stage.In a narrative I explore in my work, Coming to San Francisco made me realize that I was a zebra who had been surrounded by horses my whole life. It wasn’t until I moved away and met other artists, drag performers, and clowns, that life made sense. These unicorns, pegasi, and peer zebras have inspired and guided me through unlearning many internalized norms and behaviors. Drag, clowning, and theatrics are all ways of critiquing society through exaggeration, humor, and drama. My work seeks to engage in these same playful mechanics while also highlighting the community that grows in these spaces. My masculine drag persona Octavius Flavius explores the complicated relationship I have with my dad, and disrupts the misogyny taught to me by the men in my life and the media while, My feminine persona Foxy Lobotomy directly addresses toxic femininity and “power” placed in beauty.  Both of these personas are explored through performance and self portraiture. Embodying masculine, feminine, and genderless characters opens up conversations of existing in-between and outside of assigned sexes. In order to celebrate these alternative ways of being, I create brightly colored group portraits of queer mentors and found family, such as the painting   “ Clown Alley at Folsom Street Faire.”  Although I love traditional painting, I am also interested in creating artworks that come out into the world instead of existing on the flat plane of the wall.This has led me to create  life size cutouts of performers and hand made frames in order to bring these important people into the 3rd dimension, to take up space, and to be seen in all their campy glory. I have always had the feeling that I was never enough, but in a life of binaries, who is? My work is for fellow zebras, unicorns, and pegasi seeking to find their place in the world.