Not All Dogs Go To Heaven

This paper is in direct support of my thesis exhibition, Not All Dogs Go To Heaven, held at Gales Gallery, York University, April 11-15, 2022. This document and its text reveals the conceptual and material concerns that are relevant to the narrative and mythology that become the focus of the exhibition. Central to this project is an entity of fiction. It is never fully revealed, only referenced. The stray dog stands in as a metaphor. The path that it travels is curiously arranged and its existence is fugitive. The artworks I am creating are located in this speculative zone. Physically, the works take the form of fabricated and assembled sculptures, cast objects, acrylic structures, metal lightboxes, and digital images and illustrations materialized through commercial printing techniques. These works all exist within an imaginative area—the stay dog’s path—and are the accumulated forms of multiple iconographic references and inherit the emotional weight of the contemporary milieu. The work itself is a “check-in” of the current moment, it suspends the time it exists in order to dissect it in a slow and critical manner. Through the use of bold visual forms and imagery, the works are able to highlight the strange times we live in—a sense of contemporary angst that is sticky and bright and plasmic.