I am leading the viewer to experience a room full of sinful, sensual and guilty pleasures through a visual feast of sugary excess. I create a tactile environment of anticipation, desire and delight. Using sugary sweet colors, smooth curvaceous forms dressed with spikes, nipples, bumps and knobs, and objects of scale. The objective is to make the viewers salivate, confusing desire with need, leaving them to question, "What is temptation?" A visceral visual sugary landscape is created where food and vessel co-exist, each relying on the other to be complete and fulfilling.

ABSTRACT We Believe In the Systems That Keep Us Alive is a body of work that uses parallels identified between writing and media critique of contemporary events. The parallels are labeled as four specific systems: nutritional, administrative, life-support, and nurturing. Through a combination of interactive and object based sculpture, each system is represented with visual metaphor and allegory to place the viewer in a direct and specialized paradox. Paradoxes audience members encounter are intended to illustrate to the audience what conflicts can arise by being included in a system where governing agency of any sort does not meet with individual desires.

Blurr is a short narrative based on the authors life accompanied by a series of paintings and drawings.

Human heir catalogues the mechanism as living being through character and interaction. The life of basic machines such as hand tools and anvils is characterized by the interaction with other mechanical forms and the collaboration with their creator, the human machine. The concepts of function, personality, relevance, and existence are observed on seemingly lifeless elements, and the simplicity of the human mechanism is explored.

This thesis examines the art sales and marketing of Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Throughout the nineteenth century in Paris, the Académie des Beaux-Arts wrote the history of art by supporting certain artists who followed its ideas of what art should look like. The artists that the Academy chose to support had lucrative careers; they were offered commissions from both the church and state to paint grand historical pictures. Throughout the nineteenth century and until World War II, Paris was the artistic center of the world, and the birthplace of many avant-garde groups. Forward-thinking artists gathered together in the city to discuss their ideas about the development of contemporary art. The first of these modern movements comprised a small group of artists who in the 1860s abandoned their traditional Academic training to be allowed the freedom to paint in their own chosen style. These artists defined themselves in opposition to the Academy, which had complete control over artists' careers at the time, and in so doing were forced to find their own ways to make a living. The Impressionists' independent spirit created a need for dealers free of the Salon's constraints who would institute a new outlet for the display of works of art. Paul Durand-Ruel supported these artists by paying monthly stipends in advance for work produced to allow them to continue creating work. He created an intimate gallery setting which showed the individual work and artist more than the Salon setting, in order to cater to a new audience. He did not rely on the Salon for authorization, as dealers had done before him, and this decision has influenced the way private dealers and artists function to the present day. This thesis traces the Durand-Ruel Gallery from Paris to New York, and along with it the introduction of Impressionism to both French and American audiences.

My thesis show is sort of a mock manifesto on the ephemeral making of art, especially my art. Automatic drawing and collage are major themes and redundencies that continue to find their way into what I do. I will show the dualities between what is past and what is present hoping to find the integral ingredient that caused the past to be present. I will make the viewer question what he or she believes in. We all know that the reason for the present is because of the events in the past, but do the events of the past hold a certain tyranny over the way we live or did we choose the products, philosophies and laws that we live by? Again, by the usage of automatic drawing and collage, each image will find another question for the original question. I will not seek answers because only tangible sciences deserve to find facts; art is not necessarily tangible.

A still-life is often the painted record of a complex arrangement of objects. My aim in making the visual portion of TRUE IMAGE is to turn this sort of still-life inside out. Rather than arranging a collection of objects and making a painted or drawn image of the set up, I made simple images of things and arranged them with actual objects into three larger tableaux. The subjects of the paintings and drawings are these: checkerboards, objects, portraits, and shadows. The subjects of the tableaux are work (LABOR), home (DOMUS), and church (ECCLESIA). Viewed as a whole the exhibition asks questions about realism, artifice, illusion and perception.

Impermanence. Quiet. Words. Unfolding. Specificity. Abundance. Pattern. Compilation. Faithfulness. Vulnerability. Obedience. Atmosphere. Begun with a coffee can full of flowers, this work is an exploration of art making, self, and nature.

The photographs I make chronicle a chronic search for a home and the meaning behind the concept of home. Part landscape, part architecture, my pictures are actually still-lifes that represent people. Personalized spaces, architectural oddities, attempts to control nature thwarted; these situations fascinate me and move me. My approach is empathetic.

180 Degrees is a conceptual body of digital photography and video that deals with self-portraiture, identity and change. Intended to serve as a form of therapy, the work analyzes who I have become over the last couple of years by illustrating issues of compulsion, obsession and insecurity. The investigation confronts unexpected and unsettling attributes of my character. Some of it is a little uncomfortable for me to reveal but if nothing else it is the truth.