Over the course of several months, I toured local slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities to document how exactly an animal becomes meat. Each section of the slaughterhouse deconstructs the body of a living animal, further and further until it becomes an unrecognizable piece of flesh: from the stockyards to the kill floor, to the freezers, to the fabrication room. This process of deconstructing erases any signifiers of what was once a living being, transforming a dead body into “meat”. The meat industry uses these tools of abstraction and concealment in order to create mental and emotional distance between the consumers and the products: humans and animals. 

Within my work, I reference the full spectrum of experiences, from the eerily quiet, sterile spaces within the freezers and fabrication room to the gruesome, putrid sights and smells of the kill floor. These pieces are simple and quiet with a minimal color palette and empty negative spaces but contain complex painterly fragmented body parts and intricate almost topographic linework. The drawings in this series are intended to be displayed in an installation, suspended from the ceiling in rows directly in front of the paintings, referencing the tight rows of carcasses found within these slaughterhouses. There is a sense of concealment within the layering of the drawings and its place relative to the paintings, however, if the viewer takes more than a passing moment to interact with these forms it is clear to see what they really are. I urge the viewer to take more than a moment to acknowledge the events that happen within these slaughterhouses and our relationship with the animals that occupy them.