Artist Statement (as of December 2018):

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli
— "According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny"

Words lie hidden in their wells. We have forgotten how to read. There is something unsaid that must be said. I search for the unknowable. Part reader. Part archivist. Part philosopher. Part writer. I am a mystical archivist. Going from well to well, drawing water that others left behind. Writing means making without end. Feeling is in each text, its remnant found from one page to the next.

When I draw water from these wells, words form new meaning. Each has its purpose, moving us through the work and beyond. These words flow, twist, and turn their way out of the text through each layer of commentary I add to the text. My process begins with active reading. The pages fill; text opens up to text. I read and red lines appear. Some form words, others simple lines. I delete chunks of text. Voids form within the text. My layers of commentary—traces of the blurry, generative act of reading-as-writing—conceal and reveal.

Ink hold power. For the written word, already laced with immense power in the choices of the original author, is then once again morphed by my own process of reading-as-writing. This act, the act of reading give the book its destiny. I engage in sacred text making. My commentary a kind of palimpsest, often results in text and commentary crowding the page so tight that the page sinks, weighed down by the black and red ink. The books or prints I create transform the text to image with each mark, edit, and layer added or removed. I feel the weight of this ink. It marks me as it digs into my mind, body, and soul. As time goes on, the weight will lessen, but the marks remain—a record of your journey.

"The world exists because the book exists. the book is the work of the book. The book multiplies the book." The Book (capitalized in homage to Edmond Jabès, who wrote much about the exilic power of writing—Jabès himself was an Egyptian Jew living in exile much of his life) written by the theorist, artist, poet, and author, is the meeting place of the mystical and the earthly, the human and the divine.

I belong to the race of words. I am one of the people of the book. I am here in this world because of the book. We become language itself when defining who we are. I use new worlds. I use old words. My breath and being connect me to ancestors, other mystical archivists in their own rights: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Aby Warburg, Susan Sontag, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Edmond Jabès. All exist because their names are forever in the books of life. The words I draw from these wells connect me to my ancestors; to be in the book.

Research Statement (as of Fall 2020):

The study of art nouveau during the fin-de-siecle has been presented as an international, Pan-European movement, one that differed in name from place to place, but not in ideals. The conversation surrounding much of the work of art nouveau artists is tied up within a discussion of art for art's sake, typified in scholarship through a pure visual analysis of the decorative. Very seldom does this scholarship extend further to investigate the political, theoretical, and ideological concerns of the artists. My master’s thesis looks at Alfons Mucha, a central figure in art nouveau, and redefines his work through a dual lens of art history and cultural theory by studying the national allegories he developed. Drawing on theories of the nation-state (especially Hans Kohn’s National Messianism), my thesis reads his work as a blueprint for a new Czech national art style. I place his work closer to the ideals of secession movements that typified Central Europe than those of French art nouveau. This thesis has relied heavily on Central European History, literary studies, and other interdisciplinary fields, leading me to believe that there is a bigger story to tell, which I intend to tackle through my research at the Ph.D. level.

As I move forward with my research, I see Mucha’s art entering into a constellation of Central European artists in order to call attention to a need for a geographic bifurcation in the study of art nouveau. On one side, Western European art nouveau (French, English, Belgian, etc.) calls upon the continued necessity of aesthetic study of the work for its decorative value. In the study of the style in Western Europe, art nouveau is still heavily influenced by earlier notions of art for art’s sake. As we shift our focus east to Central and Eastern Europe, art nouveau became more about succession, where the decorative was melded with the symbolic, as well as other avant-garde ideologies. I envision that my dissertation will investigate the relationship between national variants of Central European art nouveau during the declining decades of the “Age of Empires” through a rich nexus of interdisciplinary study.