I’m ‌a ‌multimedia ‌artist living in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Most of what I make starts the same way: automatic drawing, quick, impulsive sketches, that half-awake kind of mark-making where characters and feelings show up before I’ve even decided what I’m doing. Out of that comes a cast of anxious little figures, beat-up saints, and bits of emotional wreckage that I push into the real world through painting, sculpture, and installation.

I received my BFA at New Mexico Highlands University, then an MFA in Sculpture from Fort Hays State University. School gave me the technical muscle, but the work I’m doing now comes out of lived days, especially the ones spent building and running The Skillet, the bar and restaurant I’ve owned and operated for more than 11 years. It began as a sculpture, a 300-pound cast iron skillet, then it slid into something stranger, a surreal performance space where I’m serving burgers inside an art installation.

My studio sits next door, so most days I bounce between painting and welding, drawing odd little guys, prepping food, putting out fires, and keeping the whole machine running on sweat, duct tape, and instinct. The restaurant and the artwork loop back into each other. Service industry life has its own emotional weather, and I paint that. I make sculptures out of the psychic leftovers. The daily rituals, the noise, the small disasters, the weird rhythms, they turn into devotional objects, internal organs, or jokes that cross the line and keep going. It’s intimate, it’s mythic, and it’s often a mess, which feels honest to the life it comes from.

Materials shift depending on what the piece needs, paint, plaster, resin, bronze, fiberglass, cast iron. Metal casting, especially, changed how I think about making things. You melt something down, pour it into a mold, then crack it open and find out what made it through. That same idea runs under most of my practice and my life. My job is to keep that portal open, the one between what I’m living every day and the world I’m trying to build.