Leaving Gustopher

In this exhibition, I am exploring themes of longing, wonder, uncertainty, abandonment, forgiveness, friendship, and contemplation through an unfolding narrative of symbolic proxies, including a horse, a dog, the sea, the moon, a train, a boat, and others. The work draws upon memory, recollection, and the ways lived experiences are transformed over time. Each carries its own symbolic and metaphorical weight, helping to open the work to broader themes that may have more universal human resonances. They shift roles, exchange identities, and at times contradict the chronology of the story itself, much like the ways memory is reshaped over time. Through these proxies, I hope to create a space where emotional and existential experiences can be explored without relying on specificity or human identities.

My interest in using proxies, and the horse in particular, grew from my experiences at Fox Eye Ranch near Lawrence, Kansas. Over the past year, I developed relationships with many of the horses represented in this exhibition, several of which are trained for equine therapy. Their sensitivity to human emotion and capacity for empathy became a profound source of inspiration, revealing their potential as stand-ins for human counterparts. Through them, I found a way to explore questions of care, vulnerability, struggle, humility, courage, and forgiveness while moving away from direct figurative representation.

My stories are often situated in the Midwest, where I was born and have always lived, a region frequently marginalized in cultural discourse, yet one that I find rich with beauty, moral tensions, and a nuanced interior life. Even when imagery is decidedly un-Midwestern, such as the ocean or the Grand Canyon, it often references the longing and otherness these places hold within the Midwestern ethos. I am drawn to an aesthetic rooted in place, myth, and a conflicted moral landscape that I experience as unresolved and deeply human.

The paradox of making art, I have learned, is that if I reveal myself deeply and authentically, if I share a profound personal truth, I am able to make a work of art that will allow others to experience themselves. I have found that if I detach from the specificity of my life, I can begin to see my experiences in other narrative forms, in things, in places, and through widening contemplative metaphors beyond my personal sphere. We live our entire existence within a single consciousness, through one body, and can never truly feel what others feel. Yet art can become a place where subjectivities meet, a generous and rarified space where personal truths can be offered and recognized. This is why, in every generation, the humanities and the arts remain essential: to find oneself, to understand oneself through shared experience, and ultimately, to feel less alone in the world.