Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I’m a painter exploring how vision loss affects the way I see, think, and represent the world. I have Retinitis Pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, and my work reflects the emotional and physical experience of losing sight. I combine personal stories with references to art history, using humor, anxiety, and surreal images to express both the confusion and unexpected insight that come with disability.

In my paintings, I often include an avatar of myself, along with distorted spaces and symbols like canes or fragmented eyes. These elements help me tell visual stories that invite others to imagine what it’s like to live with limited vision. I don’t see blindness as a tragedy—instead, I treat it as a creative force that pushes me to see differently. My goal is to challenge assumptions about disability and help people connect through new ways of seeing.

While at Headlands

My “Night Paintings” series will be my main project at Headlands during my residency period. I will be using source images of digitally manipulated photographs taken from walks through the streets of Sacramento to illustrate what night blindness “looks like”, with a series of paintings that make legible the disorientation of living with fluctuating vision. Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Monet’s water lilies are two important reference points for this project, as the physical and emotional dimensions of the “Night Paintings” will take center stage in making my visual anxiety legible using the visual language of painting. This series will also use scale to communicate the physical contours of my body in addition to the content reflecting the contours of my vision, with each peace measuring my exact wingspan in both the horizontal and vertical directions.