The Archive

Here you can find the beginnings of a collection of my works and writings, from years past.

2020

This pair of oil paintings on canvas represent my relationship to my home. Returning from college in Davis, I saw how the changes in the climate have affected the environment and lives of those living in the Klamath Siskiyou mountains. The first painting depicts a subdued expressionist representation of a channel of the elk creek. This first painting is the beginning of an exploration into form, space, and movement. I looked intimately at the boulders and the way the channel of water dug into the distance. The bubbling and rolling of the water gliding over moss covered stones it looked ancient. The motion and fluidity brought my mind back to my class on the physics of climate change. Then about a month ago a fire started by downed power lines and extreme weather burned through the town of Happy Camp California.

My second painting shows a pyrocumulus or fire cloud in the sky above my house, 30 minutes outside of town. I saw the dense cloud of smoke rise, folding in on itself, growing slowly into a monstrous volume of white polluted with brown and yellow. The windy, dry and hot days of summer were then thrown under a blanket of smoke for about a month.

The deep space of the stream and the frontal space of the pyrocumulus make me think of the two sides of calling these forests our home. We are given the opportunity to live among beauty and to explore it. However, we accept to face the consequences of the climate. In 2014, fire was only feet away from our house, this year the Klamath river kept it at a safer distance. However, many of my classmates, educators and friends lost their homes. While the wildfires of 2020 are unprecedented in their intensity, their intrusion into the landscape of California is a threat that has loomed in the skies over my hometown for a long time.

The climate is impossible to ignore when it so often leaves an anxious uncertainty in the air of how to stay calm, how to prepare, and what to do, when it promises to severely change the world around you. Which is why it is hard to hear officials and those in power refuse to acknowledge the importance of protecting our environment and the effects of climate change. About a quarter of my town is now displaced, staying in hotels, working, and creating fundraisers for each other. I felt responsible to call attention to their struggle and how the people in my community have worked together to help each other through some of the tragedy and uncertainty of this year.

2021

The Clouds Taught Me how to See.

Desolate and dark. Sparse glimpses of the gray clouds that fold over on themselves like waves crashing over their home.

I gotta be protected keep my head under wraps

Fold my arms and follow the law keeping myself from any traps

It’s a new world and the tide is coming in

Watching as the boulders shifting and the storm is breaking

I hear your voice like a siren in the sand

Telling me you need my hand

Here, I used vector art and digitally replicated a work of Gustave Dore from Paradise Lost: Lucifer meeting Beezlebub. This work, I believe, asks questions about free will, the formation of self, and the evolution of myth. This was reproduced into a silkscreen, which could be used to make prints.

2022

Time Spent in Two Corresponding Lives

My brief story explores the experiences of two people stuck in the corporate ladder like the grids of a comic book. The content they consume induces a sort of environmental amnesia, where you can see panels fade to white and blue. When they finally return home, they are surrounded by the patterns of the places they feel the most like themselves, and yet due to the toll exacted by work and constant advertisements and monitoring they are left to just stare as the night closes in on them and the panels shift to black.

The stories are of different people in the same life, who they are changes what happens to them, and what they see. My work wants to highlight how we can attempt to find our narrow windows of individuality within the structures imposed by the expectations to sell our time.

The comparison of the two lives allows us to look at differences in time, personality, and experience. Each character has a slow morning, bogged down by their own habits, which are drilled into them by their surroundings. How the days change are based on how the person looks at the world.

The person in life 1 is called the drifter. He is too overcome with sleepiness to notice the world around him and moves through life like the ships passing that he sees on his way home.

The person in life 2 is called the dreamer. He finds himself focusing on the moments, like the blue skies, and his conversations with people. His dreams do not fit with the time that was made by our social structures, and his way home is riddled with trouble.

As a psychology and art major, I am interested in the way our experience is impacted by our environment. I hope to explore how we can connect more authentically to people by understanding the shared social context we live within.

2023

A wind rushes over the flatlands, a whispering growl of a hunchbacked little burrowing creature, laughs in oscillations along with the tune of dry grass being pushed flat. The ground is drying out, and distant snow patches on mountain peaks are melting. Clouds still form here, and the scurrying continues as pressure lifts off the temporal lobe, in an opening of eyelids and lighting strike of scenery explodes into view.

This is the first thing he sees when he wakes up.

Where to go next?