My art is about the people we carry with us.

There is a cumulative intensity to the gesture of marks I make as I explore tenderness, the temporary, and generational space between people. Through the subtractive mediums of paper cutting and wood carving, I reveal figures and letterforms in the material over time. Time erodes surfaces, and I imitate that evidence of memory by drawing with a blade.

I use the lens of my upbringing as a Jew in rural Alaska to consider place and diaspora. The images and texts I compose are tied to that isolation and constant yearning for spaces to gather, which I translate into my ritual practice of taking these delicate pieces of paper into the world to be used as “viewfinders”. I often laminate my papercut stencils to place them in bodies of water, having the waves read my work as non-traditional books. The negative space illuminates the sky, ocean and city.

Honoring traditions of papel picado and Chinese papercut that are prolific in the Bay Area, as well as my own cultural background of Jewish papercut traditions, my work combines non-linear poetry, storytelling, and portraiture honoring unseen emotional labor. I use my papercuts as a matrix to layer on top of painted and carved surfaces. I consider my practice an extension of printmaking: generating multiples of an idea.  My work is meant to be lived with, in community spaces and in reciprocity. In my large scale paintings, I explore the endurance of grief and the elastic capacity of people. I tell stories to sustain myself and to find community.

I make remixed ritual objects in the form of grief images, etched paintings, and carved thresholds which are embedded with emotional telegrams-– a signal flare with a flame of memory trailing behind it.  I purposely alter the preciousness and archival nature of my work because I believe that in order for history to live within us it must be shared and mortal. The legacy and urgency of printmaking and labor murals works as a metaphor for my practice: spreading word and taking up space.

Working either monumentally or intimately small, I make generative projects connected to the weight of the past, human migration and the effervescent exhaustion of everyday love.