Drawings and paintings of imaginary skate parks.

This series consists of a series of retranslations between the real and digital realms. Paint is applied to the page with a brush, scanned in, and then printed out. Each of these images have crossed between real and digital seven times but are forever unfinished.

Paintings and meditations on escapism and exoticism in Western culture.

A virus is a small, infectious agent that can only replicate inside the cells of another [living] organism… Viruses do not have their own metabolism and require a host cell to make new products. The range of structural and biochemical effects that viruses have on the host cell is extensive; most viral infections eventually result in the death of the host cell.

Some viruses cause no apparent changes to the infected cell. Cells in which the virus is latent and inactive show few signs of infection and often function normally. This causes persistent infection and the virus is often dormant for many months or years.

-Vitaliy Kaminskyy, PhD

I'll be back!

-Arnold Schwarzenegger (As Julius Benedict (as T-101), Twins, 1988)


Both texts above exhibit a similar phenomenon across areas of study, that is, that a non-living entity that proliferates through the bodies of its hosts is a virus.

But that viral entity almost feels alive, doesn’t it? When I imagine some “thing” that can program others to do its bidding for it and is able to multiply because of that process, I picture it with an inscribed will existing somewhere. Of course, this side steps the purpose of taxonomic classifications, in which the labels “living” and “non-living” indicate the presence of metabolic function, reproductive abilities, etc. etc.

Popular culture that has “gone viral” usually isn’t the product of the big studios; it’s the home grown, weirdo web shit that is too goofy to not FWD: (and is just vanilla enough to spread far). But, ironically, it’s the big studios that seem to more fittingly operate in the way I associate with viruses. I’m not sure anyone ever whispered, “God, I hope they make a sequel to Bruce Almighty” in their own interest; it just happened. In the same way that a virus operates without a driver at the wheel, the production of blockbuster flicks and ephemera move through the motions until they reach millions of hosts who, in turn, recycle and quote lines until those references become the bedrock of entire personal relationships.

As an infected producer, all my most personal, intimate memories exist with these cultural monoliths as sole points of reference. I recycle tired movie quotes to you and hope you recognize the reference; meanwhile, these cultural icons go beyond points of reference quickly and soon become the intimate memories themselves, or even the inscribed wills mentioned above. The images and objects from my studio practice reflect my role as host as well as my relationship with the objects that I depict. That I maintain personal, spiritual, and sometimes sensual relationships with these various commercially distributed images/objects ensures that their proliferation be entwined with my own.