I grew up within the suburbs and shorelines of northern New Jersey. Since moving to Maryland in 2019 to pursue art as a career, my relationship to both the people and the landscape of my childhood home has shifted dramatically. This shift has served as the primary source of inspiration for my recent explorations in printmaking.

 

The Last Times On Dogwater Beach is a chaotic visual odyssey that explores the interpersonal weight of solastalgia, an existential distress caused by negative environmental change. This series of handcrafted large-scale prints aims to convey my own solastalgic experiences and the conflicting complicated emotions I feel towards my decomposing interpersonal friendships, the chaotic degradation of my home, and the frighteningly rapid obliteration of our planet and the animals we share it with.

 

Each illustrated scene is set within the familiarly fictional coastline of Dogwater Beach, a reality immersed in waste and societal disarray. This apocalyptic landscape explores the deepest fears, insecurities and vices of myself and those around me through exaggerated cartoon caricatures and a graphic style reminiscent of comic books. The environment stretched across each print satirically references the hedonistic and erotic culture endemic to the Jersey Shore, paralleled with a devastating panorama of both natural and artificial ecological destruction.

 

Hand-carved into plywood, the matrices of these prints become memorial artifacts, satisfying the raw tangible craftsmanship of relief printmaking and physically preserving every doubt and regret engraved into their surface. The intricate contrasts between black and white paired with the colossal scale of these woodcuts swallow viewers into an inescapable black hole of intricate detail; the burning car on the side of the road.

 

This series stands as a bittersweet memorial to the global and interpersonal ecosystems I have inhabited during my adolescent years, and a farewell to the weight of my personal history as I witness the place from which my life began continue to sink from a distance.