My studio practice is based on creative critical thinking around ideas. My work draws from family history and my personal experience living in the world. I think the most successful artwork that artists make, including me, captures your attention initially through aesthetics, and then asks you something. I try to make work that questions and informs, but leaves enough for the viewer to bring themselves into the work.

All around me. Questioning everything and then responding with my own reflection about what it means to be human. Who are we. Where do we come from, both in the grandest sense, but also in the most basic ways...who were our parents, where were we born, what have we experienced, who are we surrounded by, what peaks our curiosity and how do we connect all these things together. My current work is based on my immigrant story and the impact of new technologies on what it means to be human.

An award this size will make the next series of large scale gallery/museum projects possible. A deeper dive into research about how our digital life is, in my view, eroding away at the very nature of what makes us human. The incredible power of our creativity, love, curiosity, thirst for knowledge and thrills, empathy and pure joy of existing is human, and it is being stripped away at an alarming rate. Where are we going? The funds will help support research and new monumental works about it.