Dear Painting,

I make irregularly shaped abstract paintings that integrate fabric, upholstery, paint, wall textures, and furniture padding. I choose patterns and replicated surfaces that recollect the gaudy interiors often found in waiting rooms, airports, hallways, and coach buses. They also act as signs for my idea or perception of the past. The prints and textures are used not only to embellish ordinary and often overlooked floors and seats, but are also functional in their ability to disguise stains, dirt, and grime left by frequent passersby. People often ask to touch the paintings, or just rub

These works are part of an ongoing exploration of difference by means of repetition. Each piece begins with a single gesture of removal that is repeated to create negative space. Every mark is an attempt to reproduce the previous one. Inevitable variation occurs and the accumulation over time of these small differences produces an unforeseen field of depressions and mounds. These hollowed forms become molds that either yield a single cast, renouncing their potential for identical reproducibility, or undergo changes to produce a series of unique multiples.

In fiber arts, “off-loom” structures are made without the aid of a loom. The techniques include, but are not limited to, papermaking, coiling, felting, plaiting, netting, knotting, knitting, and crochet. In contrast, the more conventional surface supports used in painting are canvas and linen, which are themselves woven using a loom. In my off-loom painting series, I pour long strips of liquid paint onto plastic drop sheets. Once the paint is dry, I peel and work with it like yarn to create new modes of sculptural abstraction within the context of painting. By removing the traditional woven

I want to make it so you feel totally alive, so you feel without thinking, just for a moment.

Certain Dark Things is an ongoing series of paintings born of Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII.” I have used this piece of writing as a place to begin, and its themes of secrecy, love, and darkness as a place to pull imagery from. As the series has evolved, the forms have simplified, the velocity of mark making has slowed, and the idea of presence and monumentality have come to the forefront. Viewers are asked to find their own presence and their own body in relation to the presence of these large-scale forms.

Using the arch and the shield as recurring motifs, my paintings investigate notions of entry and obstruction, access and denial. The arch spans spatial depth and denotes a passageway or entry/ exit. It suggests an opening, an absence, a possible future; it is passive. The shield obstructs, conceals, protects, represents; it is frontal, present, and active.

The notion of liminality can be used to describe a uniquely queer experience. Transition simultaneously participates in and departs from the ritual of gender adherence. If stasis reflects the norm, movement necessarily acts as disruptor. Re-entry into the social order on the opposite side of the binary could well go unrecognized, with or without intent, as actively initiated change. Equally legitimate is the possibility of comfortably occupying a space between states. My work transmits from that place in between. It’s at home in ambiguity. By queering viewer proximity

My work has many different references and they change constantly. Some of them are images such as fertility gods, early modernist sculpture, minimalism, and the natural world.

My main interest is in the way amoebic and archetypal forms change their appearance and gain new meanings through different painterly solutions.

My work turns the structures of video gaming into a lens for analyzing the world. “Levels,” “bosses,” “items,” are words that dominate virtual entertainment. These labeling systems delineate and provide hierarchies reminiscent of both ancient mythologies and corporate structures, while highlighting the arbitrariness of their boundaries and naming. The work was initially an effort to gain image freedom in painting, using the notion from video games of “worlds without justification” (Nick Kelman, VideoGame Art, 2006, 143), where I could make random images, reconciling