Traces of Self

Traces of Self is a series of abstract acrylic paintings created over a year amongst my high school art and design students, working on them in small increments in our art and design classroom, and using leftover paint the students no longer wanted. During the painting process, while everyone was working, I actively engaged them and asked questions about my own work, seeking their critique and insights, just as I would with their work. It is a way to connect with my art students, so they can see what I do as an abstract artist and as an entry point to discuss abstract expressionism and inner emotional life. 

This body of work continues my ongoing research into the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, art education, and aesthetic experience, considering painting as a symbolic practice for expressing inner emotional states. The series explores inner feeling, fragmentation, and movement as essential conditions of being. The material process of acrylic painting mirrors the psychic act of teaching. In this way, Traces of Self reflects both a personal and a pedagogical question — how art can hold, translate, and give form to the emotional complexity of the teacher's inner experience.

Dispersed Together: Art in a Time of Distance

Dispersed Together is a series of abstract mixed-media works created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These paintings explore this global crisis in various ways—how individuals were separated in their own communities, police brutality in America,  wide spread grief and loss, and more. 

Through layers of paint, graphite, and collaged drawings, each work captures the disorientation and the profound emotional impact of that period. Fragmented structures dissolve into gestures, emotional atmospheres, unfinished and distorted human figures, and traces of inner feelings—evoking the blurred boundaries between safety and exposure, the private and the public, and the body and its environment.

The series explores how aesthetic experience serves as a form of emotional processing, based on my subjective experience of the pandemic—hearing stories about loved ones, the sick, periods of intense grief and anxiety, personal loss, and communities and individuals who were profoundly affected by both the pandemic and police brutality. 

These works serve both as autobiographical documents and collective reflections—visual meditations on how art can hold and contain the weight of crisis.