Local to the Columbia area, I'm a visual artist and a member of Gemini Arts. My work explores the relationship between form and absence through the disciplined use of negative space. Using acrylic on canvas, I focus on portraits of musicians.
Artist Statement
As a negative space artist, I depict David Bowie with his hand outstretched toward the viewer, a partially closed closet door receding behind him. Within this stark, monochrome environment, Bowie emerges not only as the iconic performer he was, but as a figure caught in the crosscurrents of perception, judgment, and historical context. Under Nazi ideology, a performer like Bowie—whose personas such as Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke blurred and defied traditional boundaries of gender, sexuality, and self—could easily have been labeled deviant, dangerous, or degenerate. By invoking this lens, I examine the fragility of cultural acceptance and the ways in which artistic transgression can become both liberation and liability depending on who holds power.
The negative space surrounding Bowie functions like the silence of censorship: a visual echo of the erasure and suppression imposed on those who resist conformity. His outstretched hand becomes a gesture of both invitation and warning, reaching across time to remind us that the freedom to perform, transform, and self-invent is never guaranteed. The closet door—an emblem of secrecy, constraint, and identity withheld—sits ajar in the distance, suggesting that progress is always partial, always vulnerable to being pushed shut.
Through this work, I aim to honor Bowie’s radical fluidity while asking broader questions about the visibility of marginalized identities, the politics of perception, and the role of art in unsettling the narratives that authoritarian systems attempt to enforce. The painting is as much about what is missing as what is seen, inviting viewers to consider how easily the extraordinary can be recast as forbidden—and how necessary it remains to step into the light regardless.