As a whole, my involvement with art comes from a deep respect for the intersections of global historical art and world cultures as a starting point to investigate how contemporary art can build upon parameters of knowledge. In my most recent series of artworks, the Centripetal Forces series of paintings, drawings and prints, I engage with semiotic systems, combinatorics and the natural laws of physics to question cultural constructions of national identities and their effects.

The centripetal force of a spinning rope acts as a natural visual metaphor for the forces that pull people toward intellectual, social and political centers. All works in the Centripetal Forces series document the spontaneous marks made through American trick roping, held in tension against the tightly structured, geometric organizational systems into which they are placed. Since these artworks document a physical action and ephemeral event, improvisational rope spinning, they are in semiotic terms indexical images and might be seen as cultural ‘evidence’ tangentially addressing American national identity through its association with the mythical status of the Cowboy.

This method expands to question the ways that Americans leave traces worldwide through political and social means. Tienamen: Between, for example, documents what may become an important time in China’s history, influenced by America’s promise of prosperity and freedom. A rubbing taken directly from Beijing’s Tienamen square during the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai centers the image, surrounded by gold leaf, encircled by pigmented traces of centripetal force. Similarly, Centripetal Forces: Circle the Wagons, Cowgirls, responds to the Women’s March on Washington, 2017, when on one day people from the globe’s north, south, east and west were drawn into centers like Washington D.C. and other global locations to enact a culture-changing moment.

The Crossed Paths series also uses a spinning rope metaphorically. To create this engraving series, I spin a rope coated with charcoal onto ten small, square copper plates laid in a circle on the floor, which I later engrave by imitating the pattern of dust residue - the traces - made through the act of rope spinning. After printing the engravings on translucent papers, I overlay two in a variety of configurations and orientations generated by a predetermined, combinatoric system yielding 6,400 possibilities. By such means, I alter the original context (trick roping) by placing it into a two-dimensional fine art system derived from Process Art to create luminous, floating and evocative relationships suggested by the overlapped images in this system.