ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is born from fracture—of the body, of nationhood, of memory. I work with cast bronze limbs, war relics, archival photographs, military debris, and collected remnants to confront how violence is inherited, obscured, and normalized. The figures appear in parts—severed legs, grasping hands, collapsed feet—not as decoration, but as testimony. These fragments refuse the myth of wholeness; they embody survival in pieces.

I am drawn to remnants of war, labor, migration, state power, and the body itself. Bronze preserves what history attempts to discard; found objects retain the memory of use and misuse. My work is not about resolution, but about evidence—confrontation, and the refusal to sanitize pain. I do not aim to comfort. I make visible what has been buried, hidden, or erased.

These works are not separate; they form a single confession. Violence is systemic. Survival is collective. The body remembers what the nation tries to forget. War, labor, migration, and oppression inscribe themselves into flesh—even when history denies it.

This practice is also an attempt to understand what it means to be alive—to wrestle with self and others in a world shaped by uncertainty. We grasp at nothing, desperate to hold onto something. The chaos can be deafening, even crippling. We enter this world alone and leave alone, yet while we are here, we reach—desperately, tenderly—toward belonging: to someone, to something, to somewhere.

Tenderness in this work is complicated by history, material, and violence. Every object I touch carries a past—a residue of hands, borders, and belief systems. I work with fragments of lived experience in an attempt to make sense of dislocation. Each stitch becomes a negotiation between care and control, healing and harm. I am drawn to materials that resist: metal that refuses to bend, fabric that remembers the body.

The works exist in tension. Beauty collides with brutality; tenderness emerges through friction- In a world where violence is systemic, softness becomes an act of defiance—a way of witnessing, remembering, and reclaiming.

These assemblages are not answers, but monuments to what we carry and cannot fully release. The work lives between rupture and repair, asking how we might hold our histories without being consumed by them.

CONFESSIONS SERIES

In the Confessions series, I use cast limbs and collected objects to explore the tension between burden and connection. Bronze hands grip one another or cling to remnants of utility — not in peace, but in insistence. These gestures expose

intimacy as labor: the act of holding on, being held, or failing to.

I work in the space between ruin and redemption.
In the pause between holding on and letting go,
the body confesses — and becomes whole again.

Broken, burdened, enduring — the body remembers. Through cast bronze limbs and found industrial materials, I explore the fragile space between strength and surrender, the point where pain becomes memory.

Chains, pulleys, and remnants of labor anchor the flesh to its history, binding the sacred to the mechanical. In these tensions, I search for tenderness — the quiet grace of endurance, the beauty that survives the breaking.

FLAG SERIES

The Flag Series weaponizes the American myth. Built from military belts, ammunition casings, tags, straps, and surplus gear -the flag ceases to be a symbol and becomes a ledger — a record of labor, violence, and consequence.I deconstruct the American flag using the very materials designed to defend it — objects that have held the weight of bodies. Assembling them into familiar stripes and stars exposes the cost of national identity and the illusion of freedom divorced from violence.

I take the flag and break it open.I unthread its myths, strip it of its promises, and stitch it back together with the remnants of what it has consumed. Belts that once held bodies upright. Ammunition that once tore them apart. Tags that whisper names and numbers no one remembers. Each piece carries the weight of hands, of labor, of loss.

The flag is no longer a symbol — it is a confession. A record of what we worship and what we destroy in the same breath.Every stitch, every shell, every scrap of fabric is an act of remembering- a refusal to let forgetting become freedom.

These works do not seek resolution.They inhabit the uneasy space between reverence and rebellion-confronting loyalty, exhaustion, and distrust in a nation that demands devotion while erasing the scars it leaves behind. I work in the space where pride and grief blur, where the stars no longer promise salvation and the stripes no longer divide the pure from the damned. Here, the flag is human —scarred, weary, and still reaching for grace.

ANIMALS SERIES

The Animals series confronts archival trauma—bodies on pavement, scenes of protest, and the presence of state force. These surfaces are not nostalgic; they indict. Images of police brutality and the positioning of bodies—slumped, restrained, watchful—provoke a visceral response. The work interrogates power and systemic oppression, asking whose lives are acknowledged within the national narrative and whose are rendered disposable. It offers no comfort. Instead, it demands confrontation with the uneasy coexistence of violence and patriotism within the same frame.

Themes of displacement, resilience, and collective trauma persist throughout the series. War, migration, mourning, and resistance unfold within painterly fields of muted color, where representation fractures and reforms. What lingers is emotional residue: anger, grief, urgency.

The work feels archival yet alive. It insists on remembrance—not only of events, but of their emotional weight. It exists within a nation structured by forgetting, and alongside people who refuse to release what must be known. Beauty and suffering intertwine here, surviving only in fragments.

206 BONES SERIES

The 206 Bones series is an assemblage of tools and body parts that confronts the violence of labor. Hands fuse with planes, clamps, belts, and wooden forms, revealing how repair and harm often share the same instruments. The body is never neutral—it is implicated, threatened, reaching. Each piece combines discarded hand tools with cast bronze limbs—objects made for shaping, cutting, building, and breaking. I assemble them to expose the blurred line between care and harm. The body emerges from machinery not as whole, but as witness—hands reaching through the architecture of labor, restraint, and inheritance.

The title is not a plea—it’s an indictment. Tenderness here is tangled with history, material, and violence. What was made to repair has also been used to wound. Wooden planes, guns, batons and metal fittings form a hard architecture of labor, while bronze limbs break through like a body refusing silence. The hands don’t ask—they claw, grip, and push back. "Be Tender With Me"- isn’t soft; it drags tenderness through the histories of work, violence, and survival.