Humanity is a delicate balance of stratum, not mixed together, but built upon one another to form community. I work with a combination of media and build narratives to engage people in a search for common ground. I found my original creative inspiration in Miami, a typically divided city, which drove me to explore how divergent communities can coexist and relate. So began my fascination in the synthesis of dichotomy and its ability to raise awareness of unseen or forgotten worlds, softening our fear of the unknown. Art provides a platform to bridge division and bring people into a dialogue with someone outside of their realm of understanding. As an artist, it’s been my obligation to rise to that challenge and show a path forward in a world that will never cease to provide barriers and reasons to divide.
This most recent body of work is entitled "Compass Points/ Forming Patterns". It began as a series of drawings that pay tribute to my early inspiration as an artist, stripping away many of the layers that I'd usually incorporate into my work and focusing on graphic elements and abstracted text forms that I worked with as a young artist. The studies were intended to be translated to murals, and have evolved into large scale installations in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico and The Vero Beach Arts Village in Florida. The compositions depict various representations of the letters of the points on a compass (N- E- S- W ), to represent the crossroads where we confront division of every sort: class, race, political, religious, levels of education, artistic, and even emotional states. The path that we follow at that juncture determines our ability to affect positive change in our community. My portrayals of navigational systems explore how we can use existing, archaic standards to forge a path ahead in a search for common ground, ultimately opening dialogue to foster fraternal understanding among all people.
