Portaling Through
2021 - Present
Using paint and artists’ books, I create portals to engage with ideas about escapism and the unfathomable cosmic questions about space and time. Portals are ubiquitous with science fiction/fantasy stories and my work engages with this canon, but it also yearns to interact with questions about the mechanics of the universe and our place within it. The artworks are cyclical where the act of creation is both inspiration and directly depicted. I recreate moments in my studio and in my life, which I then cut through to become windows to another world. Through this, my work becomes autobiographical and meta in its creation, by constantly pulling from my everyday life and reusing these moments so often that they become symbols.
Present in all my pieces, no matter the medium, are layers. I physically stack canvases and pages in a book to mimic time and space. If one were to pull apart all these layers like a slinky, it would tease out the core of the work, which is that our world and our perception of it exists in many realities and can be explored in countless ways. The portals play with these ideas of transportation, layering, multi-dimensionality, and what it might mean to travel in a non-spatial dimension.
Whatever lies on either side of the portal is of both great importance and total irrelevance. Much of the importance lies in the ability to even be transported and the resulting feeling of sublimity. It implies the human ability to imagine and travel beyond our own existence. As humans, we crave this feeling of portaling outside of our own perspectives. My work seeks to engage with this phenomenon.
Portaling Through: MFA Thesis
