Artist Statement

This body of work gives testimony to the benches of hunters, butchers, and taxidermists. I have chosen to use both photographs and paintings to document my relationship to this subject matter because each of these mediums serve very different purposes in my reflection on mortality. My photography has allowed me to document living bodies in their state of greatest tension and participate in the real time struggle that a beast will endure when its life is taken for the desires of another. In my experience I have found this type of tension to lay in direct opposition to the current crisis of our culture: our submission to a superficial quality of life that renders our humanity, through our suffering, obsolete. This crisis gives a reverant urgency to my work. My paintings allow me to be present with the process of decay. I often will spend sleepless nights capturing the image of a carcass as it decomposes. This act also gives urgency to my work. On these nights I learn that there are skeletons under everything. My work is a testament at best to the strength found in our vulnerability, and to the importance of resisting the urge to live an accidental life.