I was born and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. A self-taught artist and graphic designer, I attended Ringling School of Art and Design to study art history, after which I formed Pure Impure as an independent art curation business between 2004-2008, setting up and curating exhibits for the RSAD, The Sarasota Art Center, as well as “pop-up” exhibits three years before the phenomenon purportedly began in New York City in 2007.

I later apprenticed in filmmaking under Oscar-winning director Cady Abarca in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, I began studying directing and editing under Oscar-winning director Leon Gast. In 2017, I formed Pure Impure Film with Gast and together we began developing and shooting Rip It Up and Start Again.

I have drawn all my life. My motivation is not to express so much as to uncover, explore.
Mystified by abstract art as a child, I sought to understand it by doing it myself: to this day, drawings start with no idea, and through a long series of additions and subtractions, come to rest in compositions that stop just short of the “verbal”, or the ability to specifically name the object drawn. There is a vitally strange charge there… In this way I hope to plumb my own subconscious by trickery!

Since 2020, I’ve started making marker drawings, which took away my ability to erase unwanted lines. I thus started to make a very different kind of drawing, in addition to the ongoing pencil drawings.

For a while in my adolescence, I became fascinated by architecture, and drew everything with rulers. The free, curvilinear drawing on display here was a reaction to that highly-structured method. However, recently, architectural details (stairs, rooflines) have started to re-appear in these biomorphic abstractions.

I read the nature of the lines in my drawings as being abstracted from the human body, as well as the increasingly curvilinear forms of technological products seeking to be more “high-touch”, to somewhat hide the decidedly “no-touch” world of the structure of the machines themselves.

So, in short, you have the environment (designed objects) and inhabitant (human body) together. The rest is a mystery to me, but a compelling one.