I am a JUNO Award-Nominated hypersurrealist artist internationally recognized for my highly coterminous creations of contemporary visual art, electronic music, films, and fashion originally envisioned during my dreams. The idea for this project emerged from my investigation through various therapeutic modalities to counter the chronic sleep deprivation and major depression I was working with as a fine artist.
My trans-disciplinary practice is simple and complex, integrating eastern and western recovery-based approaches derived from gnosis and neuroscience. It plays with the new fixities of identity politics drawn from the colour-field of pop physics, combining euclidean and sacred geometry, vexillology and typography. Some of these practices include art therapy, dreamwork, and Gestalt therapy, as well as meditation, reiki, and esoteric cosmological rituals that unsettle mainstream norms of contemporary art. My work addresses an urgent need in the art world to merge explorations between personal development and avant-gardist aesthetics.
I achieved a significant breakthrough in 2017 when I discovered the unique ability to perceive and examine artworks that emerge during my dreams in vivid detail. Successive images that once appeared immaterial are meticulously reverse-engineered into tactile, obdurate objects, utilizing the same dimensional scale, mediums, and techniques.
My work explores the psychospiritual vitality of art vicariously through my dreams, acting as portals or annexes to metaphysically translocate viewers from their personal experiences to archetypal universalities. This neo-avantgarde practice of circumventing the artist's subjective input in the creation of art borrows from the original avant-garde with the incorporation of the ready-made, serial form, and a flag-oriented resemblance. The bands of simple Gestalt forms incorporate an aspect of both the ancient and modern world, and the overall vexillological format of the works also involves how visual attention is augmented through the concentration and serial repetition of the image.
The underlying formal structures I am exploring have as much to do with the hypnotic, subliminal, and meditative arrangement of repetitive commodity formulas used in marketing displays and web-based media as they have to do with avant-garde aesthetics and cult images. For example, a mode of interfacing that has become prevalent in the age of the computer screen in our reading and viewing is this sort of scanning. This is how we are conditioned to screen visual or other information today. We scan it, and it scans us—counting webpage hits, saving demographics, and tracking keystroke inputs. Everything in our environment seems subject to mechanical and electronic processing to the point where the distinctions between man-made and machine-made are difficult to differentiate. This tension between scansion and visual arrest within different states of awareness can reveal how the unconscious has been branded by advertising infrastructures redolent of monotonous imagery of the commodity form. The subversive hybrid of these methods metaphorically maps a similarly disruptive kind of complex new identity.
I hope to demonstrate that while these works challenge us to confront the abstract symbolism of the flag, the ideals it is supposed to represent and how far we are from achieving them, we can also celebrate notions of individuality.
