My paintings explore specific memories that conflate the past, present, and future, resulting in alternative narratives. Hypermnesia is an “increasing mnestic capacity in the event of crisis or trauma,” as defined by Paolo Virno in Déjà Vu and the End of History. I correlate this heightened experience with memory through meticulously rendered details that come forward through a haze of distorted recollection and active imagination. My paintings are tight––rendered concretely and opaquely. Their crispness and shallow depth reflect an interest in the conventions of Early Netherlandish and Northern Italian Renaissance compositions and portraiture.

When I consider translating stories into paintings, literary devices used in magical realism and science fiction offer pathways between autobiographical fact and interpretive fiction. I build compositions with a lexicon of allegorical imagery—from anthropomorphized binoculars, who tearfully lament and sweat, to back braces and Band-Aids, whose wearers possess a certain healing agency. These motifs introduce humor as a pressure release valve that eases their melancholy and catapults the paintings into a world where objects have emotional sentience.