Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I am exactly six feet tall and I have lived in Chicago for over nine years. My art career so far has been going pretty well but I am still not sure if i will be remembered by history as a great artist of my generation or just another forgotten dreamer, the memory of whom will fade like the final magic marker drawing on non archival paper yellowing in the storage facility of my one collectors spoiled descendants. I work primarily in painting and drawing, but have spent more time recently on carving and film projects. I am drawn in art and life to sincerity, romance, documentary, meta textual narrative, and the history of pop cultural images. I watch a lot of movies, half of which I have no memory of, but I would say watching and thinking about film has been my greatest passion outside of making art. My partner is Tatiana Sky. My favorite color is blue. My sun sign is cancer. I care so much for my friends and I always wish I could spend more time with them and I occasionally make furniture and frames.

Do you have any opinions on the amount of work being produced by artists in this current climate? How do you deal with this yourself?

It is hard to work when it is so warm out. They say it is getting even hotter still. In the hotter months I often stagnate in the studio and get so sweaty and covered in sawdust and feel a mess. It is hard to be productive with the social obligations that summer brings as well. Due to these factors, I reserve all judgement of my fellow artists and the quantities of work they produce. I try to take regular showers and hold on until winter when I can get back to producing in greater quantities.

What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?

Personally I feel incredibly privileged to have the time and space and circumstance to be able to maintain an artistic practice at all. The struggle of being an artist to me are the exact struggles of existing as a human being in a cruel and unfair world. But in terms of my work I wouldn’t describe any of it as a struggle. If you know how long I have been trying to write a screenplay you might call it a struggle but I personally feel that I just haven’t given myself the proper conditions to carry that out. I believe you can’t force something out and you just have to stay determined to get something done and let it come when it comes.

I have struggled with IBS ever since I was in middle school. The tests performed on me through my teenage years were all inconclusive. I have, in the past couple years, stopped eating gluten and this has helped a lot. My condition, however, is still exacerbated by anxiety-inducing situations like live theater or long uber rides as well as when I am made to drink a lot of light roast coffees for my job.

You’ve talked about liking art that “shows its work.” Why, and what does this mean to you?

I think I have often been attracted to genres and media in art that are often highly illusionistic: painting, illustration, and most acutely perhaps, film. However within those categories I am drawn to artists that ‘give the game away’ and participate in the illusion while also revealing its tricks. Quentin Blake’s illustrations for Roald Dahl have been a primal influence since I was a baby. The term “faux naive” I think is validly applied in certain cases but I think it’s over used and in the case of someone like him, he knows exactly what he is doing and there is nothing fake about it. Then later with film, seeing the films of Jean Luc Godard had a huge impact on me. He seems to speak directly to the audience in the language of cinematography and editing, revealing the apparatus at the same time as using it in its classic application. Art like this operates on multiple planes at once, with text and metatext, revealing and commenting on each other.

Is there any source material you find extremely relevant to your practice right now?

Though I don’t think many would describe my work as naturalist or realist, I have been consuming and thinking about a couple of artists in that vein lately. I have been reading the novels of Emile Zola, most recently I am finishing The Masterpiece. A Frederick Wiseman of 19th century France, his major series of novels attempted to capture nothing short of all French society during the reign of Napoleon III. One takes place in the coal mines, another in a department store, and The Masterpiece takes place among his friends, the impressionists. His plotlines can be quite melodramatic and on the nose but what stands out is the richness of detail which he would mine from his subjects with journalistic precision, researching extensively before writing began. A deep and passionate feeling of love for humanity and concern for the world at large exists in his work that I also feel and share this need to capture the brilliance and pain and beauty of humanity.

I have also been loving the films of Hong Sang Soo recently. He works on a small budget and crafts these intimate stories of human interaction, usually at least one comes to gene siskel every year. Narratively, the scale is almost as small as it could be but like Zola he cares about these details of human life and feeling.

My work often swings like a pendulum between very referential, in the world of pop culture, camp, and then being very personal and autobiographical. I would say my show at Sawhorse felt very much about art and recently I have been thinking more about life. The big scroll (“parade”) I made for En Route I was definitely trying to get on my Zola shit and capture something real.

You’ve recently started working more in the element of sculpture. Do you think you’ll do this more? How does it compare?

Sculptures take up so much space in the studio, not to mention when they all have custom pedestals. Which is why I am excited to announce that as of this interview being posted all my sculptures are now 50 percent off buy one get one free while supplies last. I have always had ideas for things in all different mediums and have made sculptures as long as I’ve made painting. I think right now I am thinking almost entirely about film, because I have one that I am trying to put out there and one I am in the early stages of writing. I am also excited about etching which I hope I will be sharing soon the work I have been doing at pigeon hole press.

Do you find a lot of your work to be historically referential?

Historically my work has been referential and historical period and incident has also been referenced in some of my work. I am not sure which you mean.

Do you think of space and architecture when making your work, or is it more so conceived in its own private setting?

I think most of my work is for a room with white walls but I would obviously love to make a giant figurative sculpture the size of the bean one day.

Your work almost always exhibits figures. Can you speak on why that is? Does it feel more personal?

Sometimes there aren’t figures but that is true. I think it’s just to do with the art I’ve loved throughout my life, especially film and book illustration and a love and investment in humanity. And thinking about human interaction analytically has had a huge impact on the development of my critical sensibility from the time when I first got into feminism and all that stuff.

Can you speak on the importance of accessibility and community in the Chicago artworld?

I think access to the arts is something everyone should have available to them. My personal feeling is that the whole economic order of the world needs to be destroyed and replaced with one in which every single person can have the freedom to follow their life’s passions and access the arts guaranteed. I think there are many great programs in Chicago helping improve access to the arts like arts of life or public grants and public art but I think the greatest barrier to accessibility in the arts is wealth inequality, poverty, and racialized systemic state enforced violence.

Do you think your paintings might take on different contexts when shown in different areas of the world?

I don’t think I know enough to answer the question as I have only shown here. I would like to think my work would be as well liked here as anywhere which is about six percent.

What was the last show you saw that stuck out to you?

I am really excited about Junior gallery. I think Noelle and Matt and Nick are doing a great job and the current show “Pure Moods” was really fun. To be honest my favorite show for a long time was the Alex Katz show at Richard Grey. He is just one of the goats. The whole show was giant paintings of two figures in close up with a bright baby blue backdrop. I have always been drawn to and hoped to achieve that kind of focus and clarity in a group of work. Because each painting has such consistent content and form, the individual works begin to play such subtle notes and the emotion of the interaction is like really well written dialogue even though the scenes feel utterly silent. There seems to be something strange and dark between the figures in the paintings but each painting is also just breathtakingly beautiful. It also reminded me of Marguerite Duras’ writing how she digs digs digs into the minutia of a specific interaction, specifically I was thinking about her novella, Emily L.

Interview conducted and edited by Liam Owings