ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is born from fracture—of the body, of nationhood, of memory. I use cast bronze limbs, war relics, archival photographs, military debris, and other collected remnants to confront how violence is inherited, obscured, and normalized. The figures appear in parts—legs severed, hands clinging, feet collapsed—not as decoration, but as testimony. These fragments refuse the myth of wholeness; they embody survival in pieces. I work with remnants—of war, labor, state power, migration, and the body itself. Bronze preserves what history tries to discard; found objects retain the memory of use and misuse. My work is not about resolution, but evidence—about 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 one confession: violence is systemic, survival is collective, and the body remembers what the nation tries to forget. War, labor, migration, and oppression carve themselves into flesh—even when history denies it.

This work is my attempt to understand what it means to be alive—to wrestle with self and others in a world of uncertainty. We grasp at nothing, desperate to hold onto something. The chaos can be deafening —crippling. We are all just visiting. We come into this world alone and leave alone. But while we are here, we reach—desperately, tenderly—toward belonging: to something, to someone, to somewhere.

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 addresses archival trauma—bodies on pavement, protest, and state force—set against fields of red, white, and blue. The flag reappears only to be interrupted by grief, migration, uprising, and restraint. These surfaces are not nostalgic; they indict. Through collage, I juxtapose images of racial violence, civil unrest, and marginalized communities with the stark iconography of the American flag.

Here, police brutality and the positioning of bodies—slumped, restrained, watching—invite a visceral response. The flag no longer unifies; it confines and suffocates. This work interrogates power and systemic oppression, asking whose lives are recognized within the national narrative. It does not offer comfort. Instead, it forces confrontation with how violence and patriotism often coexist within the same frame. Themes of displacement, resilience, and collective trauma persist. Images of war, migration, mourning, and resistance unfold within painterly fields of muted color. The flag fades—secondary to the human faces caught in exhaustion, defiance, and desperation. What remains is emotional residue: anger, grief, urgency.

The work feels archival yet alive. It insists on remembering—not just events, but emotions. It exists within a nation built on forgetting and among a people refusing to let go of what must be known. Beauty and suffering intertwine, and that truth survives 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.