I am interested in the complex relationships that question the understanding of how social environments shape us, oftentimes referencing social issues within a community context. In my work, I set out to explore a multilayered realm of ideas on social and urban sustainability. Having engaged subjects as diverse as the factors that influence an understanding of people and their environments, my work can be seen as environmental interventions in which I redefine materials scavenged from the street as sculptural installations that respond to the impromptu

I use the subject matter of female soccer players and a soccer field as metaphors to address issues of gender expectations and socially enforced rules. These players are female-identifying, though often masculine in appearance. They are sometimes seen as androgynous or as men, and I welcome this ambiguity. The soccer field’s painted lines mark its boundaries and designate an interior area where alternative rules apply.

My practice focuses on realist painting. By taking advantage of oil paint’s great capability of rendering alternative realities, I use mellow colors and thin glazes to create realistic figures, objects, and spaces that evoke a sense of sinister. Film, especially horror and cult film, has been the main influence in my recent work. I am interested in imageries of violence, danger, and tension, and I depict them in a way that mimics the format of film still, while leaving the narrative incomprehensible.

The imagery I begin with typically confesses to a rite of passage, sexual awakening, or some other coming-of-age tale.

I call some of the recent work “gutter” paintings, which is a reference to the the gap between cells in a comic strip. These larger pieces are constructions of many small canvases clustered into a grid formation that may suggest a spatial, narrative, or symbolic meaning to the viewer.

Another group of paintings begins with similar source imagery, but differs from the “gutter” paintings in that the images are progressively superimposed on a single canvas.

I make slow, seductive painting with archaeological depths. Conversant in the language of color, form, line, and space, they are transparently layered amalgams of reference and meaning. My goal is to keep painting relevant, not simply as an idle tool of capital, the most convenient of value containers, but as an affective vehicle of transformational experience. My paintings are rooted in an American vernacular, harnessing iconography distilled from the language of popular culture, intensely aware of our universally networked and integrally dependent contemporary

I make paintings using a vocabulary of abstract forms. Floating shapes disperse across the surface. They cluster in corners or fall off edges, denying gravity and altering perspective.

I often find myself shifting between clarity and confusion in the painted space, and I search for an arrangement of forms that feels whole. I think about the dialectic relationships of stability and instability, control and gesture, structure and chaos, and through my work hope to give recognition to the fleeting moments I see.

It has not always been this way, but I draw now because I desperately want something to happen, some impossible thing. I feel so moved when I go to a place that people come to with faith, having little reason to believe that what I want can be summoned by me. Can I be sure that I will meet the lover I long for? How will I grow a full forest, having no land? How do I build a tall greenhouse that attracts more life than what I put in—a pollinator garden? I’m not sure it’s working, to want so intensely.

To reason with the limited visual glossary of beauty and health paragons often conflicts with the grotesque absurdities of the body. This work is a response to this paradox and a confrontation of the space we take up when trying to take up as little space as possible.

My paintings are exaggerations. I draw on classical imagery and popular culture to create hyperbolic depictions of psychological states. I take the license to depict things differently, to complicate stories and provide commentaries on the scenes I make. For instance, sometimes I look to vandalize the solemnity of the Western tradition of academic representation through an embarrassing detail. At other times, a cartoonish character requires the intervention of an element painted almost photographically. I consider these elements and shifts in style as