My paintings walk a line between the real world and one shaped by emotional perceptions. I project possible communities by drawing from both a historical and an imaginative past, present, and future. I am interested in challenging tradition to champion the full humanity and nurturing rationality of successful communities of women. I utilize imagery and ideology from the Women’s Land Army and female separatist groups, as well as inspiration from literature and contemporary culture.

My paintings reconcile a desire for beauty with the clumsiness of my hand: they show how the failures of my eye are translated from my body to the painting surface. Confidence, familiarity, and insecurity are modulated through the mark making, and shift according to what’s being described. There’s a degree of awkwardness or second-hand embarrassment that’s tangible in the paintings, which comes out of a desire to give a subject the kind of care and attention they deserve. That’s an embarrassing goal and it puts you in a vulnerable position. I like to incorporate

My paintings are about the people and border town of El Paso, Texas, where I grew up. I create narrative portraits that depict the everyday lives of my family, friends, and even myself. The environments in my paintings illustrate the circumstances of living next to the US–Mexico border in low-income Mexican American neighborhoods.

I am attracted to banal scenes that express the cyclical order in which we simultaneously perform and become victims in acts of conflict, domination, submission, misunderstanding, comingtogether, and falling-apart. This humorous but tragic cycle is repeated at a societal level as we navigate an increasingly fractured, anxiety-ridden, globalized world. The paintings are similarly splintered and spatially dense, as they represent the fraught power struggle between self and other. These scenes of conflict are where we grapple with the limitations of our personal

I make pictures of things I like in a room by myself. I look for a sort of hum in them: a moment of click and drone where I find something self-evident; a moment when there is a sudden quiet. This sentimentality is weird and circular, like tricking myself into learning about my hands as if they weren’t mine. As if I loved my hands and wanted to love them publicly but found myself unable to without some outside information.

My work is a collection of brightly colored paintings, prints, drawings, found objects, made objects, and poems. It combines playful comedy and satire with a mishmash of weightier subjects. Throughout my work, I bring together mass-produced objects and imagery with a childlike and whimsical aesthetic. The viewer walks into a lively space, a world of curated objects, wall drawings, and characters that appear to be up to something. It’s like pages from a children’s book that have been sprinkled with snippets of scripts from late-night talk shows where current events and pop

Trompe l’oeil, fiction, and surrealism are the major influences on my work. When you believe in a trompe l’oeil painting, you are believing in nothing, and when that moment is broken, reality is questioned. This, in part, is the genre’s connection to surrealism. The play between the real and the unreal. Where there is an opportunity to question reality there is also an opportunity for the viewer to question themselves. Fiction plays at this slippage of reality. In a work of fiction, reality is concentrated. It is not naturalistic. All of the boring bits are cut out, and events unfold

In these images, I aim to depict the complexities of intimacy in a world in which relations outside of heterosexuality are subject to suspicion and ridicule, attitudes deeply informed by broader cultural and religious forces. Repression, shame, unbridled enthusiasm, the desire to control and decorate all commingle in an attempt to represent these identities visually. Although I am interested in human interaction and dynamics, the works are often allegorical, shifting these ideas of figurative representation into a world of plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings. This

Shards of found tile, figure studies, fine-art reproductions, yesterday’s papers, life drawings, album covers, museum drawings, a potted ivy, photos of friends passed, and a pile of discarded wood—these are fragments of life. They are evidence of a variety of experiences. They are guests arriving and slipping away from a gathering. Sometimes they have urgent and important things to say. Sometimes they are bores. Sometimes they are loud; they argue and interrupt one another. Sometimes they are wallflowers. But to listen to the conversation and remain

My paintings use the deconstruction of narrative and the disembodiment of gesture to create imagined spaces and navigate impossible distances. I approach each painting as if it were a stage—actors are arranged, props are placed, and a fiction or allegory is created. The objects and imagery in my paintings arise from dreams, mythology, ancestral history, poetry, geological phenomena, and scraps of paper around the studio. As the images converge on the picture plane, the objects inherit new life through context and juxtaposition. Each object gives