F.L.E.S.H.
Fear did not come first. Beauty did.
F.L.E.S.H. is an ongoing body of work concerned with the structures we build around experiences we cannot fully explain.
It considers perception, identity, memory, belief, and the uncertain boundary between what is experienced and what can be understood.
Not everything requires resolution. Some things remain.
For my sister, Rachel Morin
Rachel Morin was my sister. She was also a mother, a daughter and a friend, but even those words cannot contain an entire person. She was funny, flawed and deeply human. She had a crude, hilarious sense of humor. She filled family gatherings and game nights with laughter, ridiculous moments and inside jokes that belonged only to the people who knew her.
After Rachel was murdered, public attention necessarily centered on finding the person responsible. For a time, that attention mattered. He had to be found and held accountable. But that search is over, and I no longer want the person who ended Rachel’s life to occupy more space than the life she actually lived.
The violence inflicted upon Rachel is real. Nothing here attempts to soften, erase or look away from it. But what happened to Rachel is not the same as who Rachel was.
The blood belongs to what happened to her. Her humor, her children, her relationships, her memories and the life that came before it belong to Rachel.
F.L.E.S.H. is an ongoing body of work shaped by memory, identity, grief, faith, beauty and loss. Through paintings, images, materials and language, it considers how a person remains present after something irreversible has happened, and how the worst moment of a life can begin to eclipse everything that preceded it.
This work refuses that eclipse.
It is dedicated to Rachel as my sister, not Rachel as a case—and to the part of every person that violence cannot explain or possess.
So this is for you, Rach.
FALSE LIGHT.
ENDURANCE.
STEALTH HARM.
Three things.
There had always been three.
The work begins with fragments.
Images are built, damaged, buried, and returned to. Marks accumulate. Forms disappear beneath other forms. What remains visible is only part of what was there.
Nothing is erased completely.
F.L.E.S.H. exists somewhere inside that accumulation—between memory and invention, beauty and damage, the thing itself and what it becomes after we have lived with it long enough.