Interactive installation (oil painting, PHP, HTML, P5.js), 2025.
My BFA thesis project Tell Me What I Am is an interactive installation about the politics of personal perception and the relative truth. I have included the photo above to represent the physical installation, which uses a projector to display randomized user data submitted to a survey that allows viewers to interact with the piece. The survey form that asks users to judge my personal traits based only on the oil self portrait above. The survey is available to access at this link. My artist statement is included below.
Tell Me What I Am is an interactive installation piece about the nature of personal identity, and whether a truer identity lies in how one perceives themselves, or in how it is enforced through social and legal constructs. Identifiers such as race, income status, disability, and gender serve as the basis for social hierarchies legitimized through discrimination, legal and systemic institutions, and now, through technology. I ask the viewer to take on the voyeuristic perspective of a facial recognition software to assign me these identifiers based on limited visual information, to simultaneously interrogate the truth of these labels as they relate to personal identity, and to critique the perceived reliability of facial recognition software as they relate to personal data profiles.
The installation provides the viewer with an online survey form asking them to answer questions about my identity based only on my self portrait. The results are displayed to the audience using a projector and a custom interface I programmed using the P5.JS JavaScript library. I created the survey form using PHP, the standard language for dynamic web content, to lend authenticity to the form’s visual language. The form results are saved to a JSON file that can be read by the P5 code. The results interface takes inspiration from the aesthetics of facial recognition software interfaces to contrast the handmade quality of the oil portrait it is projected against, or to give the appearance that the identity assigned to me by the audience is more “official” than the painted depiction of myself I provided.
I created this piece to wrestle with my feelings about maintaining an identity wholly separate from the one recorded on official paperwork, in the sense that I personally and professionally go by a name and gender that does not match what was legally assigned to me. I find it difficult to “be myself” in a society that has decided that legal sex is immutable on personally-identifying documents, reflecting a very recent cultural and political backlash against the transgender community. I often have to inhabit my legally-enforced persona to avoid public humiliation and harassment, causing personal distress. I combined this with the unease I feel about the increasing pervasiveness of digital surveillance tools that often run in tandem with the collection of user’s legally-identifying personal data, to prove personal authenticity or verify user age, often without informed user consent regarding how that data is used or stored. With Tell Me What I Am, I wanted to make it clear that one’s relationship to social hierarchies, such as gender, are inflicted upon people and enforced by the state, rather than truly self-determined.
Unity Engine, 2025.
My first game, Ye Olde Pynballe, is a simple pinball game inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts. I had the opportunity to exhibit this piece at Bowling Green State University's annual ArtsX exhibition inside of an arcade cabinet. The project will be available on itch.io for free download once finished.
Unreal Engine, 2025.
This scene was created using Unreal Engine 5's Terrain tools. I modeled the grass and violets in Maya. The density and base color of the foliage is dependent on the terrain texture, i.e. grass is less dense on dirt patches. There is a wind effect on the foliage using world position offset in the material and vertex color on the mesh. This also includes a shifting noise overlay in the diffuse channel to emphasize the wind. Lastly, I added a Kuwahara filter to the scene to add a painterly effect.
Digital painting, 2024.
For this piece, I was inspired to create a room as an homage to David Cronenberg, my favorite director. I decided to create a scene implying a figure unseen had experienced some sort of bloody transformation as a reference to the body horror work Cronenberg is known for. The pictures and objects on the wall are references to his filmography, including pieces from Dead Ringers, The Fly, The Brood, eXistenZ, and Crash. To create this piece, I did the thumbnailing and painting in Photoshop, and I created a 3D version of the scene in Blender to assist with the extreme camera angle.
Digital painting, 2025.
I painted this scene in Heavy Paint after a particularly foreboding hallway in the basement of a church. I am drawn to scenes that emphasize space and light, especially in seemingly abandoned or underutilized areas. This piece was an exercise in relinquishing control over fine detail by using a software that encourages a "painterly" highly-textured workflow.
Oil on canvas, 2024.
I painted a studio in Anderson Hall at my previous, now-defunct, institution, the University of the Arts in Philadelpha. I was fascinated by the complexity of the pipes in the ceiling, and of the way the light was reflecting off the white painted wall in the late morning.
Oil on canvas, 2024.
In 2024, I was interested in exploring bathrooms as a space for privacy, so I did a painting of my friend's bathroom in his dorm. It had an odd room layout, so I decided to exaggerate the color palette and perspective to make the scene feel uneasy.
Oil on canvas, 2024.
This piece, titled Sunday Breakfast, was a painting I did of the breakfast order I would purchase every Sunday morning on my way to work in the studio while I was a student at University of the Arts. I thought it would be fun to explore metallic reflections in the foil, and I realized I had never painted food before, so I wanted to challenge myself with this piece.
Blender, 2024-25.
My pet project in pushing my 3D skills has been a model of my character Agnes. In the process of modeling her, I have learned the basics of character topology, hair curves (i.e. Maya xGen and Blender Hair), and texture baking. This model is still in process, as I teach myself more about cloth modeling. For now, I have a render of her textured head.
Digital painting, 2024.
This scene depicts a dilapidated billboard for an inn I saw on a drive to Bowling Green, OH, from my hometown of Dayton. The setting sun reflected very strongly against the orange billboard, and I worked from both photo and my memory to recreate the feeling I had when I saw it.
Digital painting, 2025.
I painted my character, Agnes, who is often the center of my exploratory, character-based work, to experiment with using softer brushes than I am normally comfortable with. When I paint Agnes, I try to experiment with new techniques or color palettes, as her design is quite plain.
Digital painting, 2024.
This piece is an abstracted self-portrait I made in my first semester at Bowling Green State University after transferring from University of the Arts. I spent this semester extremely homesick for my previous institution, so I spent a lot of time reminiscing about this particular dorm I inhabited in my sophomore year. I only had a single photo of this kitchen to work from, so this piece is constructed from my memory, as well as 3D software to visualize the scale of each object.