My current body of work explores painting’s longstanding relationship with artifice. By combining painting’s history of appropriation and reinvention with images that reference a gendered kitsch, I explore painting’s ability to connect disparate images and cultural references.

My work utilizes humor as a tool because of its capacity to transition between different roles—it is alternately defensive, disarming, dismissive, or provocative. Humor is also polar, existing at the levels of both superficiality and sophistication. The initial idiosyncratic nature of the painted image can offset the subtext of the painting and vice versa. This gives way to a tension between surface value and content.