Bits and Bobs | Galleri Urbane | Dallas, TX | 2021

Bits and Bobs started the way a lot of my work does—with scraps. Leftover shapes, weird offcuts, things I had lying around the studio that didn’t fit anywhere else. I kept collecting these “bits” and “bobs” (a British term I’ve always liked for its vagueness, its friendliness, and its refusal to explain itself). Eventually, they started taking over.

In Bits and Bobs, I wanted to pack a kind of playfulness into a tidy format. Each piece plays with line and surface, color and texture, but in a way that’s intentionally off. They’re made from painted wood—cut, glued, stacked, and inset—then arranged just so, or just not-so. The decisions might look spontaneous or even careless, but they’re all worked over, lived in, edited, finessed, obsessed. It’s a mix of patience and play, and I try to let both sides have their say.

There’s a fake clumsiness to some of the craft that I love. The bright colors, janky geometry, and late '80s vibe aren’t ironic. They’re sincere, and a little nostalgic. I grew up in that visual world. Think cereal boxes, Saved by the Bell, Trapper Keepers. But then I’m also sneaking in painter moves: shifts in texture, lines that frame and reframe space, surfaces that flip from opaque to translucent. Sometimes they act like paintings, sometimes like objects, but mostly they’re somewhere in-between.

The big installation along one wall was my way of letting the “bits” run wild. Hundreds of them. Like patterned wallpaper or confetti. They feel casual, but every curve and cut has a rhythm. In a roundabout way, these are all drawings to me. Not with graphite, but with wood, space, and line. I’m not trying to solve anything. I just want to keep poking at the line between sincerity and absurdity, between haphazard and thoughtful, until something new jiggles loose.