After 14 years in prison, so many of the things I have to say or beyond my words. Art is how I communicate.
You decide who will appear in Artforum Magazine, take home $25,000, and display their work at The Art of Elysium's Salon!
I lean into the dark and Gothic. My favorite work to create lives somewhere between still life and narrative. I’m drawn to building scenes that feel intentional: like everything in them has a reason to be there, even if that reason isn’t immediately obvious.
Where do you find inspiration?I don’t really think of inspiration as something I find. It’s like something that’s always there, waiting to be noticed when everything else gets quiet. A lot of my work comes from objects that already carry a kind of weight:skulls, wilted flowers, old glass, things that feel like they’ve outlived their original purpose. I’m drawn to that tension between beauty and decay, where something can be both fragile and permanent at the same time. There’s an honesty in that space that I trust more.
What would you do with $25,000?If I had the 25k… I would deepen my studio practice and return to the places I came from; willingly for a change. In prison, identity erodes: time flattens you. Art was the only resistance. I would use this to work with my friends in reform groups, to build workshops for the incarcerated, offering structure, focus, and a way to see themselves as something other than a cog in a broken machine.
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