My artworks are internal explorations of my postindustrial midwestern psyche - daydreams of self, encompassed in the degraded influences of the past and the rusted landscape of the present.   

The compositions are ruminations upon my upbringing and daily experiences within the rustbelt’s half-decayed ruins of thought and infrastructure. Overgrown tire shops, evaporated factory jobs, and dive bar binges to wash it all down under the shade of the 20th century. 

Through layers of image, time and place, I confront topics of class, labor, addiction, and self-destructive tendencies of the region and my experience. Suspended piston rings and chrome auto badges fall across this oxidized internal realm while crumpled beer cans lurk in the  long shadows of yesteryear. These visual poems I am constructing are therefore influenced by the post-industrial ruins that surround me and the cultural ruins that form me within this place.

In this pothole stew of image, the here-and-now blends with the then-and-there of the ruins I am conversing with. An ongoing dialogue with the ideas of a chromed bygone era I never knew – jagged edges all but airbrushed away in the sunlight of a sober Monday morning. If these historic images I appropriating where a celebration of the post-war American dream, my realms contemplate an obituary for it. In conversation with this inherited past, I incorporate images of my daily life and upbringing in the Rustbelt Region – automotive factories, pole barn garages, and liquor-store signage covering the surfaces like faded tattoos on a neighborhood mechanic.

Combining eras and auras, the artworks create separations between moments of thought, chaos, and calm simultaneously existing within self during reflection. The importance of these works is not in their individual elements but in the mass and the mess of their collision.