Gouache on paper
5×8”
2025
Cityscapes: basins & meadows is a series of small scale works featuring landscapes framed by man made elements, from sketches taken inside the “meadow” of Las Vegas and the “basin” of Lincoln County, NV.
The body of work is inspired by City, a 50 year project by Michael Heizer, a monumental work of earth art.
This earth art re-frames the elements of cities: gravel, concrete, stone, roads, buildings, into abstract shapes and structures.
I had the privilege of working for the Triple Aught Foundation and was able to visit Heizer’s City in 2023. My time at City deeply influenced the way I think about the city itself, and the framing of the natural world around us.
My work explores the Abstract Sublime as described by Robert Rosenblum as "flattened, spreading expanses of light, color and plane...the irrational and the awesome...boundless energies and limitless spaces."
Michael Heizer's City is a contemporary earthwork (art made from the earth) example of this. This body of work aims to find the sublime within man-made architecture, and compares and contrasts the monochrome elements of City with the architecture of the city (Vegas).
The Abstract Sublime is a formless experience, one that requires us to imagine someone else's experience of a thing. My paintings are recreations of a sublime experience, and in the case of the paintings of Heizer's City, the recreation of the recreation of a sublime experience.
In many paintings of large scale abstraction (Mark Rothko) or overwhelming natural beauty (Albert Bierstadt) the subject matter is displayed on a large scale as means to overwhelm the viewer in the same sense.
My paintings do the opposite. They are anti-monumental. The paintings frame the experiences through my lens: from memory, sketches, glances in the rearview mirror, snapshots on the side of the road.
This body of work seeks to bridge two experiences of the sublime: encountering subliminality of natural beauty through the framework of city architecture and the experience of the sublime through a work of earth art.
In my recent exhibition, Prairie Princess/Desert Dandy, I layer texts from a variety of sources on the history of Nevada. These books focus on early and pre-Statehood Nevada, as well as contemporary issues like gendered work, sexuality, labor rights, and equality as it relates to the recent history of Las Vegas and Nevada. Combining historical nonfiction and accounts of the Las Vegas and Nevada area pre- and post-statehood, the work layers text to create alternative narratives, and put a highlight on the missing parts of the narratives from traditional histories of the West.
In the present day, we have a renaissance of revisionist history in which we can go back and identify the individuals who have otherwise been left out of our narratives.
These digital drawings are amulets of protection, inspired by Kabbalah, 90s computer games, and concepts of meditation and space.
Copies of digital files and stickers are available in the shop.
2021-2022
