Artist Statement
Inspired by ancient mythological archetypes, their psychology, and visual depictions, I have focused, during the last decade, on the design of a fictional mythology and its visual iconography. Employing a primitive pop-surreal graphic style, I investigate questions of identity and spirituality, as well as the media’s effect on personal memory and fantasy. My cross-disciplinary exploration delivers a mythology through an integrated transmedia experience, that includes graphic novels, paintings, animation, ceramics, sound, prints, installations, and performances.
As a visual artist, scholar, and graphic designer, I am instinctively attracted to visual systems. My research on visual language and visual style centers on the designs and techniques found in ancient religious archetypes and symbols, as well as in cartoons and comics characters. The application of symbols in my compositions follows an invented visual grammar, a combination of hieroglyphic language and mysterious alchemical schemas.
I create and collect symbols, characters, scenes, and myths -- a repository from which I spontaneously draw in a surrealist stream-of-consciousness manner. I then coherently fit it visually, and conceptually into my compositions, my personal mythology and iconography. I like to describe this practice as a psycho-archaeological inquiry, a fictional world design.