Heaven is Not the Wide Blue Sky explores a collective longing to touch and know realms beyond, to transcend both time and existential uncertainty in the face of rapid environmental degradation on a globally unprecedented scale. The work dwells at the psychic intersection of imagined, archetypal pasts and paradoxically playful yet apocalyptic futures, at once seeking to confront the gravity of our current human predicament and simultaneously seeking refuge in the pursuit of deeper patterns and rhythms that pulse beneath the surface of all life, imbuing the material world with ecstatic beauty and life force.
The paintings of Reverie explore the idea that the basic human drive to ornament the material world is fundamentally innate, irresistible, and at its core, motivated by deeper impulses to understand the meaning of life and to experience a universal, elemental or essential reality. The work approaches painting as a vehicle to engage with the act of ornamentation as a disciplined and sustained practice, and as a means of dialoging with fine art, folk art and craft traditions that for centuries have sought to interpret nature through a lens of careful and ornate pattern work, ultimately echoing the cellular patterns that constitute all matter.
The paintings of Nature, Fabric & Collective Memory find conceptual grounding in the idea that the basic human drive to decorate and adorn the material world is a fundamentally sacred or devotional one. Continually deferring and referring back to the language of nature, the work approaches painting as a vehicle to explore the act of ornamentation, using natural elements such as trees, flowers, cells, and alien or marine-like forms. Highly detailed in oil and gold leaf, these elements function as visual building blocks of elaborate, dreamy, yet earth-bound realities, foreign yet viscerally familiar places where the consciousness can dwell and find new perspective.
