Nominated by the University of Chicago My art utilizes my intersubjective encounters as both an atlas and analytical tool. It is a source that mobilizes context and experience, specifically for me as they pertain to humor, longing, and queerness. I strive to fang relationality in a manner that engages the viewer with their others, and so too my art affixes onto itself a longing for touch. Texture is a dear friend of mine, physical and affective. It is the goal of my own artistic experimentation to generate an object that exists in an intermediate space of experience, between what is felt and what is shared, that delivers the feeling of contact. I feel that setting the generation of a new but familiar texture as a goal of my work effectively locates itself in an intermediate space of relation. Whether in image, object, or stream, I strive to give my work a distant touch through texture. And in an attempted generation of life, this means relationships— personality, trust, serendipity, novelty, and communication. I wish to understand my art as a cite for personal discovery. I hope for the depth offered by my own experience to enter a conversation, but not to interrupt the depth of potential relationships others find themselves making with my work. For this reason, I often find myself comfortable working with abstraction and distortion. I find a freedom in a concept without one body and am thrilled when I think of how one’s personal relation to one abstract form is different from that of another. I understand here that the purpose of my art is to divert attention; to maintain an echo of the symbolic in its ultimate departure from the form of its natural surrounds, wanting for the ear to freely interpret its remains. Image: Projections, chairs, muslin, canvas, acrylic paint, 4’x2’, 2018