Western Pleasures is an exhibition of my new and recent work: three large paintings and five small collages made over the last two years.

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across painting and collage as well as drawing, writing, bricolage, and installation. My art practice is a way of sorting through disquieting ideas: shame, whiteness, masculinity, colonialism, class.

The show takes its name from my largest piece to date, “Western Pleasures (two afternoons)”: a ten foot long painting on dropcloth – a roiling cauldron of colours, shapes, words, and images. My paintings have been steadily growing in size over the years. Large paintings in particular possess an innate gravity, a presence, almost as if they were beings in their own right. The other two paintings share that appreciation of scale but are, more precisely, experiments in composition: sewn and painted textiles (unfinished paintings, terry towels, found fabrics, blankets, raw canvas) ripped or cut and stitched into relation with each other, alive with words and symbols tied to the same subjects.

The five collages are a small sampling from a much larger, ongoing body of work, the product of years of practice and refinement. Three were made this summer at the Similkameen Artist Residency in the Okanagan valley. Collage’s capacity for surprise suits my intuition; it is an alchemical methodology. Even at small scale, these dense, tightly configured compositions draw the viewer in close to see what magic is percolating there.

I am a non-binary settler who lives and works in so-called Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded ancestral lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations.