Everything I am, and will ever encounter, is as old as the beginning of the universe. Mass and energy have been recycled throughout all of time to compose the entirety of my life. I am not a human experiencing the universe, but rather the universe is experiencing my humanity. Nonetheless, I experience consciousness that leads me to focus on my individual, personal existence. How can we begin to grasp that a size much smaller than the punctuation that will end this sentence created all the atoms in our 14 billion light year wide universe? How can we understand the temporality and fragility of life in a universe that exercises such a cyclical nature of atoms? Can joy, compassion, and goofiness separate us from being inert, cold space junk? I use painting and drawing techniques to create juxtapositions of the intimate and the cosmic, asking what it means to be a human in this vast, absurd universe. My considerations of how the universe`s trajectory allowed the creation of such gentle, destructive, simple, and complex creatures like ourselves inspires me to make multimedia paintings and sculptures that visualize origins of life on Earth, human spirituality in relation to the cosmos, collages of curiosity, alien life on other planets, and thoughts on mortality. Both humorous and scientific approaches are inherent to my work, as these concepts allow an approachable yet researched nature to such intimidating concepts. My series Cosmic Queries depicts various sketch-based pieces of goofy alien creatures encountering typical human emotions. While other works feature portraits of deceased individuals for their family`s keeping. I am completely obsessed with how we arrived to our position in the universe, how we experience this given position, and what the future holds for us personally and cosmically.
