All The Rooms At Once

The title of this series All the Rooms at Once comes from an experience I had as a young man. I was there when the farmhouse I had grown up in was demolished. As the machinery pulled away the exterior walls, I could suddenly see nearly every room of the house at once. A place I had known my entire life opened like a dollhouse. Rooms that had always existed separately became a single space, and memories that had lived apart suddenly rushed forward together.

I have carried that feeling with me ever since.

It changed the way I take in the world around me. Ordinary things: objects, animals, interiors, and the things we live with every day seem more sacred to me. The more time I spend with them, the more there seems to be worth considering.

I become hyper-fixated on the things around me. A bowl, a bottle, a flower, or a pattern may stay with me for years, returning in different paintings as my relationship with it changes. I revisit these things because they continue to surprise me. I can paint something I have painted before and discover that it has somehow become something else entirely.

As a queer and autistic artist, I have come to understand that this way of looking is inseparable from the way I experience the world. I notice patterns, relationships, and small shifts, and I can remain fascinated with familiar things long after they first catch my attention. Painting gives me somewhere to follow that attention. I don't have to explain everything I notice. Sometimes I can simply paint it.

Over time, I realized I wasn't painting separate subjects. I was building a world where familiar things could continue their lives beyond their original purpose. Paintings made years apart began speaking to one another in ways I could never have planned. One painting would quietly answer a question another had asked years earlier.

Together, they became different rooms within the same house.