I am a Chicago based artist, teacher and occasional curator.

I work in a variety of media including painting and drawing, video and sculpture to build contemplative and funny relationships and spaces. By contemplative, I mean to captivate and hold a viewer in a moment of discovery or pleasure. By funny, I mean for the work to be strange and/or humorous.

The accumulation of small marks, chance operations and textural fragments creates optical energy, and embodies an off-kilter sort of life-force that I think of as my style. Disparate sources such as natural phenomena, urban decay, new-age symbolism and studio-craft merge to illuminate everyday life within a cosmic context.

In my newest series of paintings and drawings, invented botanical forms are used as a vehicle for improvisation. Plants and grasses function as a flexible structural motif, as detached symbols of the natural world, and as allegories for human behavior.

I received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2002. I have taught at SAIC and Ox-Bow, and have been a full-time Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago since 2007.

*I would approach a commission as a set of basic request guidelines, such as color palette, scale and compositional density, (such a single spacious form or a busy field of forms). I could work on stretched canvas or paper. In general, the imagery and motif would remain consistent with my new botanical work.