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STATEMENT

My art-making in the past three years has focused on investigating the landscape in which I reside, an industrial and severely depressed section of East Oakland. The environment is peppered with abandoned cars, collapsed architecture, endless graffiti and tagging, and infinite amounts of other urban detritus. Foliage is at such a minimum, that trees in my sense of nature have been replaced by intersecting telephone poles, and one could easily count the existing plant-life within a ten-block radius.

Yet within this seemingly bleak visual landscape, bright, beautiful, and hopeful intrusions occur, like a visiting carnival, offering a distraction from the languid and somber landscape. Inherent in all this, has always been a realization that there is a very real and strange beauty to the landscape, however fractured and evaporated it may seem.

This newest work is an endeavor to explode the spirit of what I perceive as an urban landscape, introducing moments of quiet beauty, in which elements of the detritus fall calmly within the pictorial space, or moments of aggressive noise, punctuated by references to various cultural iconography, of which, ostensibly seem out of place.

New outside forces, however disparate and unrecognizable, are colliding within the framework of the landscape, alleviating and heightening the volume, purging the levels of the noise into some kind of final dream, that slowly fades.