The stories we collect shape the people that we are, and this series of paintings represents my coming to terms with that identity, with the threshold at which we make decisions—as artists, as creators, as individuals, as viewers, as people—and how we move from one point to another.

As an artist, I am drawn to places where duality coexists, where one phenomenon, principle or truth intersects with an opposing phenomenon, principle or truth. My work is vested in the relationship between the external and internal. These two things seem to be opposites, but there are places where they intersect, where they meet, where they rub against one another and create something worthy of consideration.

This series is not about birds, or merit badges, or The Boy Scouts of America, or some metanarrative where birds or merit badges are a metaphor for people and our daily strife toward a definable identity. This series, these layers, these multiple mediums are a challenge, an invitation to consider paradox, unanswered questions, accidents, truths, paradigms—mine and yours. This work is just as much about me as it is about the viewer, our shared social experience, our shared histories, our mythologies, where we intersected, where we will intersect, and the trickster that waits for us in the in-between.