I’m interested in the relationship between highly personal, specific, and familiar elements of our world and the surreal, absurd-to-the-point-of-being-abstract bastardizations of those elements that we generate and reflect back to ourselves through the Internet. I collect stills from homemade craft tutorials on YouTube, Craigslist “free stuff” photos, and children’s claymations, for their common quality of being several times removed from reality, both visually and conceptually. In studying and manipulating these images, I both push them further into and pull them back from abstraction. Shapes and compositional elements tend to stretch and compress as I draw and redraw them, from screenshot to Photoshop to paper to canvas. Filling the shapes with hard-edged airbrushed gradients confuses the spatial relationships between them, as some space flattens out and some deepens, and I use clashing, saturated colors to root the paintings in an alternate reality, maybe a spin-off of the real world. And I use run-on, stream-of-consciousness titles, combining personal, political, and pop culture references to suggest new contexts for the final images.