PAINTINGS
ALL - COLLECTIONS
PAINTINGS IN OIL, ACRYLIC, WATERCOLOUR, INK
BIRDS
BOTANICALS
STRUCTURE & SPACE
SERIES
NOBODY'S HOME
The lights are on. Construction garbage flaps in the wind. Are we pre-humanity or post?
Nobody’s Home is a series of mid-size oil paintings* depicting surreal scenes of vacant (mostly unfinished) suburban dwellings and aquatic creatures which inhabit seductively desolate environments; landscapes, waterscapes, spacescapes, and ambiguous hybrids. The imagery comes from my own photography of real-world constructed environments (residential developments and aquarium displays) rearranged and overlaid to form imaginary tableaux – some in media res, others quietly teeming with potential energy.
This body of work began in 2018, during my final months in southern Ontario. My neighbourhood of ticky-tacky tract housing was one of several modern developments that enveloped the historically rural Hart Farm. The marches of time and progress had formed a hundred-acre agricultural island, floating fallow in an ever-expanding sea of suburban sprawl. One day, the “For Sale” sign was replaced with a billboard advertising “Guelph’s First Net Zero-Ready Neighbourhood!” That winter, I began documenting the transformation, continuing on return visits in 2021 and 2023. Since then, I have also documented the eerily similar development occurring in my current neighbourhood on the southeast frontier of Lethbridge, which I expect will inform future work in this vein.
Themes of Nobody’s Home include climate anxiety in the Anthropocene, as referenced in the flood and ocean garbage of Rising Tide.
Challenges to the linearity of time emerge the longer one contemplates Something’s Coming, the title of which echoes the excited language of land developers’ signage, as well as one of the most common reactions I receive from viewers.
Intended to arouse the interest of prospective buyers, these words convey an entirely different meaning when applied to this scene; isolated in a bleak landscape of snow and mud, a derelict suburban house stands paused under roiling, foreboding skies. What stage of life are we witnessing? Is it the last remaining relic of bygone civilization? An abandoned home – previously lived in, loved, now falling down? The linearity of time begins to feel illusory. After death, we will feel just as we did before we were born.
Closer inspection of the painting reveals the future dwelling is still under construction – never yet having been inhabited. Will there be time… before it’s too late?
Aquarium imagery entered the equation around the time Covid travel restrictions were lifted, as themes that were driving another painting series converged with emerging undercurrents of Nobody’s Home.
Welcome to the Neighbourhood contemplates transformation, exploration, migration, and displacement. In this work and throughout the series, jellyfish serve
as vessels for the ‘alien’ – a layered and loaded term evoking both curiosity and fear of the unknown. In the call of the void, a voice asks what secrets may yet lie hidden in the depths of our oceans, outer space, and the human psyche.
Connected to ideas of discovery, expeditions, odyssey, and colonialism are questions around what the terms individual, self, and collective each mean in relation to responsibility, preservation, and freedom - the last of which strikes me as a very Albertan topic.
Throughout the creation of this series, I continue to experience a shifting blend of nihilism and hope. I maintain a reverence for nature, ‘the sublime’, and mathematical elegance, as well as an unshakeable belief in human ingenuity, compassion, and determination. Indigenous perspectives are helping me decolonize, as I explore my relationship to my ancestors, my fellow inhabitants of earth, and the lands to which we belong.
GLASS BARRIERS
Reflections of protection, ownership and separation. Glass offers a window at the price of distortion. Time, traps, access, attention, love, objectification, othering, museums, pet stores, plastic plants and plaster bones. As more work on this series develops, the rest of the words will come. I hope these verbal prompts offer a window into a series in progress. Welcome and stay tuned.
SCREAMING BEAKS
I needed a break from slow painting, from precision and existential crisis. On the other hand, I never need a break from birds, and existentialism is non-optional. I made these when I was in the process of shutting down my Guelph studio to move to Alberta, so they're small. And they're loud. And they're sold. But they can be purchased as prints or on clothes or cushions or if you have a crazy idea for them just let me know and I'll see if I can make that happen. Scream on, my fellow creatures, scream on.
