In my practice, I explore my cultural identity and family memories, creating vibrant, layered textile works that are rich in topographical texture and infused with both drawn and collected imagery. My pieces are crafted using a blend of traditional and non-traditional techniques, including needlework, quilting, weaving, and dyeing. Through these processes, I reflect personal moments from daily life while channeling thoughts of family history, childhood fantasies, and nostalgic cultural ephemera.

Reconciling with weight carried by grief, I wonder where to start. It seems there is no beginning to an unknown end. To exist in a state no longer burdened by mourning, I investigate materials from family members I’ve lost. Physical documentation marks moments that are gone. It is a window to the past, veiled by the curtain of time, a construct believed to mark progress. I map these territories as a catalyst for reflection.

Paintings create space for meaning within contradiction, telling truths through falsehoods. I am interested in how a painting can hold opposites in tension without negating either one, how a form can be both positive and negative, a space simultaneously vacant and full.

My recent work borrows from architectural and ornamental forms such as altars, theater sets, and stages—all sites that frame specific actions and actors, suggesting a connection to performativity, whether ritual or theatrical. The possibility of an actor is more compelling to me than the depiction of one.

My interdisciplinary studio practice has consisted of video, sculpture, photography, artist books, and, most recently, painted collages inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. The tight and controlled collage process helps inform the language of each picture. By recontextualizing quotidian objects with fetishistic play, I reconfigure fruit, plants, curtains, and shrimp cocktails, replacing their original functions with those of physical pleasure and perversity. Caught in private moments of leisure and play, anonymous subjects are posed in scenarios whose theatricality

Much of my work is grounded in my religious upbringing and a previous generation’s experience with a kind of mystical spiritualism. It is common to find passages within Mormon religious texts of wilderness as holy, mountains as sacred grounds, or the desert as a spiritual refuge. Allegories and parables of seeds, plants, and the growers that raise them are frequent tools for teaching doctrinal concepts. I revisit some of these passages through art, and work to reinterpret them from a contemporary context. In moving from Utah to New York and

Inspired by the sky in transition from day to night, I paint color gradients to capture the ephemeral beauty of moments of change. Architectural and sculptural elements create an invitation into the painting and serve as a symbol of transformation and awakening. Energetically colored skies and minimal landscapes draw the viewer through and beyond the painting to consider what lies ahead.

This body of work is inspired by making daily drawings that record my everyday emotions, intuitions, and sentiments. Sometimes they are abstract, preventing the viewer from reading them according to the semiology of the visual system that our eyes are educated with, and sometimes they are recognizable enough to link the viewer’s eyes to familiar forms such as objects, body organs, and figures.

Through painting, fibers, installation, video, and soft sculpture, I challenge historical norms in figurative painting that are based on a female muse and male genius artist, presenting my vocal female voice as a counter. Mining my experience of navigating the fluidity of identity throughout a long-term partnership with my husband that began when we were fifteen, I flip traditional gender roles in portraiture.

His devotion is to the motion (and not so much the potion), that’s what keeps him goin’. It’s not about the smoke or the toke, but the tussle of the muscle. The fingers linger from north to south, table to mouth, puff and poof, breath in, then out.

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a town of no more than a few thousand residents. Deeply conservative, most placed religion above all else, and anyone deviating from religious doctrine was treated as a herald of immorality. I was a man whose love for men violated the cultural norms, forcing me to conceal my life from others, causing feelings of guilt and alienation.