In my work I have established an iconic language inspired by the rural Hawaiian landscape, where the ‘wild west’ of American myth is here pushed to the edge of westward expansion. Utilizing collage, print media, installation and animation, this iconography populates surreal geographies of beauty, color and line in an ongoing personal narrative of an intruder in a secret garden. Using the allegory of landscape, I explore notions of displacement, vulnerability and authenticity as well as my relationship to natural and super natural worlds; drawing attention to the complicated triangulation of relationships between man, land, and animal and notions of freedom, invasiveness and belonging.
Containment Landscape Series is a body of work that includes mixed media collage, printmaking and installation where a water tank is the central subject. The tanks were once abundant in Hawai’i and are often used as a water supply for cattle troughs on open ranch lands and to collect water for home use. The images of the tanks I am dealing with were primarily built in the 1920'-70's and represent an older lifestyle that is very much tied to agriculture and the unique Hawaiian ranching culture of the Paniolo (Hawaiian Cowboy). Both industries and their subsequent lifestyles are disappearing quickly, they represent an older time; nostalgia for open spaces, working with plants and animals as opposed to hotels and restaurants.
Water tanks are commonly found in the Hawaiian landscape where I was raised and have always resonated with a personal sense of loneliness and isolation. They are usually the sole architectural structure in open and vast landscapes. They seem to represent an infinite potential, a mystery, a feeling of displacement and beauty. The latent potential that the tank and the water it contains becomes a representation of myself and of my internalized experience. They become a sacred, temple-like space inviting reflection and reverence. With my images, I hope to suggest a world that is complex in its layered emotions and one that encompasses with, empathy, humor, wonder and a hidden element of critical anger that, while poetic in its expression, is at the same time, a deeply rooted critique of the contemporary 'order of things'

Gouache, layered paper, hand-cut inkjet prints on paper.