The first glimpse of what would turn into an epic narrative called After the Woods appeared to me in a dream many years ago.  A sleeping couple are transported to a future version of Earth with sentient nature and technology but no people.  The man awakes, finds and dons knight’s armor and is no longer human.  The woman appears to fade into blades of nanotech grass but in reality has already gone into a nearby woods.  Those images became the foundation of an alternate universe I have been drawing for over twenty years. 

My protagonists live one day, nine months, their full life span, and 1,000 years all layered at the same time.  This allows my art to examine scale and culture from shifting historical perspectives.  In 2021, I completed Assembly of Crowns, a 6 x 12 ft. drawing that distills various chapters of the overarching narrative, creating one work that summarizes hundreds of drawings. 

Although I enjoy science and math, I always made art even as a young child.  I won art prizes in high school and community college, and then discovered all the people I had been seeking for years when I transferred in 1996 to the Cooper Union, New York, from which I received a BFA in 1999.  My studies in New York were underwritten in large part by a Community Foundation Grant established by Ken Branson, a patron of my artwork from San Diego.  I received this award from 1996 through 2001, when I completed my MFA from Columbia University, New York.

While attending Columbia University, my artwork shifted from painting to sculpture.  This change was driven by an emergent allergy to solvents and a small, unventilated studio, but I embraced the change.  During my two years there, I made sculptures and installations exploring aviation and the metamorphosis of technology, and I converted my studio into a living sculpture installation—a step toward the development of a self-contained narrative that I would later title After the Woods.  I received the Joan Sovern Award, Columbia University (2001), which is nominated by faculty; the Hayward Prize of the American Austrian Foundation (2001); and the Salzburg Kunstakademie Fellowship, Salzburg, Austria (2001) for sculpture.  Shortly after graduation, these awards facilitated my travels in Europe and a six-week fellowship.

Europe was a revelation.  I grew up in a bilingual household and had lived in multiple countries, but I had never before experienced anything like Europe’s many layered cultural and historic mosaic.  It reminded me of an experience that had occurred flipping through an art history book: within its 800 pages, I noticed a morphing universe of gestalt.  I wondered if a story could be told with many shifting time frames.  Eventually, my art work would create a mythic story that moves through narrative time, biological time, geological time, cosmic time, a birth, and one revolution of Earth.

I returned to New York City three days before 9/11 and was sleeping on a friend’s couch in lower Manhattan while I looked for a place to live and work.  In shock, we watched the twin towers collapse.  It was a strange and iconic period, a mixture of disbelief and comradery, confusion and reassessment.  My ambitions of large sculptures now felt out of sync, and I started to draw in my sketchbook, which soon became my portable studio.  These drawings helped depict scenes and characters from my evolving narrative After the Woods and would be cut out and exhibited in future shows.

In 2002, I participated in three group shows: two in New York, and a collaboration with Lansing-Dreiden in Miami.  I again received the Hayward Prize of the American Austrian Foundation (2002); and the Salzburg Kunstakademie Fellowship, Salzburg, Austria (2002).  In Europe, I developed a collection of small drawings depicting trees and information.  It was an intuitive version of what forest ecologists now call mycorrhizal networks, or the “wood wide web.”

My first solo show in New York occurred in 2003: Arboreal, 31 Grand Inc., Brooklyn, NY.  It featured cardboard sculptures and the ink on paper drawings for which I was becoming known.   That year I also participated in a number of group shows: four in New York, one in Massachusetts, one in Los Angeles, and one in Munich, Germany.  I moved into a new studio, and curators and collectors began making visits.  The artwork grew in depth and scope, and I was invited to submit work for the Whitney Biennial, as well as to create a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1.

The beginning of 2004 was a whirlwind of creativity as I completed smaller works to accompany the installation of large drawings at the Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (catalogue; poster), and worked on ten panoramic drawings for After the Woods: A Selection, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY.  My artwork, which by now was clearly being produced in segments or chapters of a larger narrative, was well-received and covered in a number of articles and publications.  The summer after the museum shows, I completed work for another solo show in Los Angeles, and painted the top floor of a stairwell at PS1 with a permanent installation mural called “In the Woods” that continues to be maintained and cared for.  I also exhibited in I Feel Mysterious Today, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, FL (catalogue), as well as five group shows in New York, Massachusetts, and Berlin, Germany.

By this time, the narrative behind my artwork was fairly established, although it continues to be refined and expanded.  After the Woods is a tale of separation, misunderstanding, reunion, and fated evolution. It revolves around Polygone and Versus, two lovers who are torn apart upon conceiving a child and transported to an alternate reality and universe. Through time, Polygone is transfigured from Renaissance princess into a spaceship, representing advancements in technological intelligence. Versus in his knight’s armor transforms into an oak tree, indicating his ability to attract and affect the natural order, including speeding evolutionary growth in plant life to absurd proportions.  The forest they inhabit, including its creatures, develop bizarre adaptations informed by folklore, scientific speculation, and myth. In this fantastical reality and encoded labyrinth, Nature gains access to human archives. The ultimate fate of Polygone and Versus is to dissolve and transcend as one environment, giving birth to Polyverse. All of my artwork orbits the core of this story, although it is not produced or exhibited as a chronological narrative.

In 2005, I was invited to do a solo show with Carlier | Gebauer gallery in Berlin, Germany, and the gallery also sponsored my exhibit at ARCO Fair in Madrid, Spain.  In addition, a triptych drawing was curated into a group show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.  The museum then commissioned a series of prints to be made with master printmaker Neils Borch Jensen.  I was an Artist in Residence for nine days while I completed the work, which was shown as part of the 2005 exhibition On Line, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (catalogue).  I also was invited to make etchings at the Leroy Neiman Center for Prints, New York, NY (2005).  My artwork was included in the hard-cover publication Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, Emma Dexter editor, Phaidon Press, New York, 2005, as one of 109 featured international artists.  During that same year, I participated in four group shows in New York, including Greater New York 2005, MoMA PS1 (catalogue), and showed at galleries in Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo.  In addition, the pace of acquisitions of my artwork by both public and private collections was accelerating.

Momentum continued in 2006 with a lecture and conversation at MoMA, The Persistence of Figuration, with Dana Schutz and Glenn Lowry.  Three major works from my solo show Games for a Blackout Machine, Guild and Greyshkul, New York, NY, were acquired by MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum.  Four months later, I presented a new series of works Floral Veins and Conduits, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, about extinct and endangered flora; it received an extensive review in the Los Angeles Times and sold out.  I also participated in nine group shows, including Twice Drawn, The Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (catalogue), the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, and Travesia Quatro, Madrid, Spain.  For The Compulsive Line: Etching 1900 to Now, MoMA, New York, NY (2006), I exhibited a series of 12 prints made during the 2005 residency at the Neiman Center, which were then acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

Traps, Screens, and Offerings, Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin, Germany (2007) was my biggest solo show to that date, and included a large stained glass sculpture commissioned by the gallery.  I was invited me to live in Berlin for six weeks leading up to the show in order to finish the drawings locally.  Back in the USA, I attended the Steep Rock Arts Residency, Washington, CT (2007), which included a financial grant and space to begin a large scale painting, later to be shown at White Cube, London, and gave a lecture at The Drawing Center, New York, NY.  In addition, I participated in five group shows, including Multiple Interpretations: Contemporary Prints in Portfolio at the New York Public Library, New York, NY; Every Eye sees differently as the Eye, The Drawing Room, London, UK (catalogue), a show celebrating William Blake’s anniversary; Like Color in Pictures, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (catalogue), and at galleries in New York and Vienna.

Echo Gambit, White Cube, London, UK (2008) was the first major solo exhibition of my artwork in London.  It explored the relationship between nature and the separated protagonists/lovers of my narrative After the Woods.  White Cube produced a publication to accompany the show with texts by Tom Morton and Joao Ribas, and commissioned an edition of etchings.  During 2008, my work also was in four gallery shows in New York, and I was invited to participate in Art on Paper 2008: The 40th Exhibition, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC.  My work continued to receive positive reviews and was featured in several magazines (a list of publications/bibliography is available).

Her Affect on Branches (Topography) of Contact, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2009) was my first solo show in Asia.  I exhibited a series of small and medium size drawings in which I visualized remote events growing out of natural forms, but as abstract information.  Group shows included at galleries in New York and Miami, at The Print Center, Philadelphia, and Desenhos: A a Z (Drawings A to Z), Museu da Cidade, Lisbon, Portugal.  In addition, I gave two lecture in New York in 2009, at the American Federation of Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum.

In 2010, I presented the solo show Relics Where…, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.  Thematically, I was focused on impermanence and the paradoxical condition by which information presents disembodied records.  I also participated in No New Thing Under the Sun, Royal Academy of the Arts, London; the PortugalArte10, Portugal Arte, Lisbon; Kupferstichkabinett: Between Thought and Action, White Cube, London (catalogue); Amor Parvi oder Die Liebe zum Kleinen, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen, Germany; and at galleries in Madrid and Dallas.

I was incapacitated most of 2011 and 2012, as I dealt with a failed back surgery, followed by a spinal fusion, and continued my struggle with persistent Lyme’s Disease.  My body simply put on the brakes.  My work was exhibited in a two-artist show Berlin – Paris 2011, Torri, Paris, France, and in Publisher’s Spotlight: LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Pace Gallery, New York, NY (2011).  I continued to make art but, due to the physical rigor the drawings required, the output was negligible; thus, I lost my galleries and my home/studio in upstate New York.  If not for the grace of family, friends, and a few steadfast collectors, I would never have recovered.  Certainly it was not a happy time, but Goya, Matisse, Proust, Yeats, and Frida Kahlo, among others, were forced to work during periods of illness, or to embrace their constraints as the subject matter.  I adapted to my immobility by reading extensively on neuroscience, mnemonics, biology, anthropology, myth, astrophysics, quantum dynamics, nutrition, geology, climatology, and many other fields.

By mid-2013, I had delved into the real science behind the themes in After the Woods, worked extensively on the narrative, and had a hefty file of ideas for new concepts, such as the Codex and the Theory of Mythobiology, as well as for new bodies of work.  Topics of fragility, erosion, accretion, ascension, and earth as a vehicle for the unconscious, where it records the manifestations of a cultural collective, were primed.  Chthonic or underworld realms and stellar distances seemed somehow to capture what I had gone through, and were incorporated into the narrative of After the Woods.  For several years, my body had been like a piece of wood resting in the forest, and this ironically imitated the chapter developed in Echo Gambit (London 2008), about the dissolution of the physical body to create new life.  The recent highly internal and hermetic period of my life was opening up.  That summer, Settlements: Selected Works 2002-2013, a survey of twelve years of my art exhibited at Pioneer Works: Center for Art and Innovation in Redhook, New York.  It included a 160-page catalogue which I co-edited and co-designed.  I also gave free drawing lessons at Pioneer Works, as encouragement to others.

Thanks in part to Settlements and its reception, I was invited to work, once again, on a series of prints at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University.  Rather than focus on specific etchings, however, we began a two-year collaboration (2014-2015) fostering the polymath approach to art and subject matter.  The result was a collection of prints and series which are among my favorites, as they show both exploration and dedication to craft.  In addition, I was accepted for an Open Sessions Residency at The Drawing Center to continue work on my new concept of a Codex for After the Woods. The requirement for participation and mission of the residency is to encourage dialogue and projects far outside the realm of the artist’s typical practice.  My Codex represents a language system within the narrative that draws from runes, hieroglyphs, ideograms, Chinese characters, ancient languages.  Columbia University invited me as Lecture/Visiting Artist for the Senior Thesis Class (2014), and my artwork was included in group shows at two galleries in New York City and in Mapping Madness, The Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing, China (catalogue).

In 2015, I was invited to participate in Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which was a group show of artworks from their collection.  This included a video interview featured on their website.  My Artist in Residence Print Projects at the Leroy Neiman Center for Prints continued into its second year, and I also was awarded a multi-year continuation of the Open Sessions Residency at The Drawing Center (2014-2016), but with a shift to code and information as emotional entities in the narrative.  My artwork was exhibited in seven group shows during 2015, including at the Guggenheim Museum, the Southampton Arts Center, The Drawing Center, and LeRoy Neiman Gallery. 

During 2016, I participated in three New York group shows: Cosmic Connections, TOTAH (catalogue), New Prints, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, and Good News, Josee Bienvenu Gallery.  I continued to steadily make artwork and to develop the narrative of After the Woods, which had grown to hundreds of pages of narrative, poems, and theories.

In 2017, I received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, based on merit and need.  It gave me time to work on large scale drawings, as well as to complete the first edit of the total narrative, cementing sections, chapters, and segments.  As a result of this clearer guide, my output of artwork flourished.  I participated in four group shows, and a two-person show in 2017, including: Contemporary Silhouettes: The Art of Cut Paper, Cahoon Museum of American Art, Cotuit, MA; DRAW / Boston, MASSART, Boston, MA; and The Fall, Apollinaire Fine Arts, London, UK (two-person show).  Interestingly, the other two shows—Botanica, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Wormwood, Ellis King Gallery, Dublin, Ireland—were curated in tandem by Todd Von Amon.  Opening a week apart, both exhibitions contrasted themes of decay and renewal, and Wormwood included six drawings from Nocturnes (Ocular Moons), a series of circular graphite drawings exploring the connections between sensory and visual experiences.

To date, 2018 has included a solo show Nocturnes & Chthonic Dreamer, EC Studio, New York, NY, and an earlier Open Studio show which included unseen drawings ranging over twenty years.  I also participated in Pollinators, Cahoon Museum of American Art, Cotuit, MA; and DRAW / Vojvodina, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, in Novi Sad, Serbia. Additionally, I was invited by the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY, to do a walk-through lecture on “Art and Storytelling.”  Upcoming events include a group exhibition 100 Sculptures, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (September 21-November 3, 2018), and Stefanos Geroulanos from the History Department of New York University is writing a 60 page essay on After the Woods.

In 2019, I participated in an animation group show at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery (February 23-April 28, 2019).