Nominated by UIC I take great interest in human psychology regarding obsessive and compulsory actions. This interest stems in part from my career as a sleep technologist conducting research on nocturnal human behavior. My experiences have given me insight into how we connect with both objects and others in a physical and psychological manner. I am fascinated by the way our relationships with secondary bodies become distorted perversions of their sources. I often find myself drawn to the deceptive nature of perception, in particular, the moments when perception latches itself to traumatic albeit pleasurable experiences. I create objects and images that depict my fascination with the plasticity of reality. These works allude to gruesome acts, death, or pleasure that reflect on the mutability of the senses in both body and mind. The image-based components in my work present a dismantling of 3-dimensional form to enhance or dispel their illusion of a singular truth. In treating images as avatars of the original objects, they depict a propositional space. The intimacy of objects interacting with images is abstract and elastic, revealing closer truths about our vulnerabilities and obsessive tendencies. I juxtapose materials that emphasize softness and/or rigidity to embody the organic and fragmentary fuzzy nature of memory. Scale is a way to distill a particular obsession or fetish into its purest form in relation to the human body. Through the repetition of surfaces and gestures I present a merging of two realities with the alchemic mechanisms of sculptural form and image space. Image: Slippery Mess, 2014.