In my current body of work, I explore how the landscape of the American West shapes ideas about American identity today. As a starting point, I am looking at idealized versions of the American West represented in landscape paintings from the 1800s. Formed by composite imagery from nature, these works of art were used to build the image of America through the lens of European traditions.

My process combines handmade and digital techniques to deconstruct and reshape sourced imagery to form new paintings that straddle the line between real and imagined. By employing vibrant, saturated color, abstraction, and unexpected shifts in space and perspective, I want to draw the viewer into the spectacle of the landscape and then turn them loose to reckon with their own experience and desires in a new wilderness.

Through my work, I aim to create a new version of the American landscape, one that embraces contradictions. It is at once flat and expansive, light and dark, saturated and dull, beautiful and threatening, and familiar and strange.