Our urban environment and our bodies are stories in perpetual progress. These narrative marks are often overlooked and ignored. We walk on carved-out steps and worn-through carpets without appreciating the visual links to the moments that created and defined them. My work is focused on the marks we make on spaces and people, and how they in turn leave their marks on us.

I paint easily recognizable subjects to explore how different cultures interpret the same information. Using signifiers in imagery, I encourage the viewer to create his own narrative. A single signifier may have a completely different meaning to diverse individuals, especially if cultural experiences, uses, or traditions for that specific indicator vary. However, in today’s globalized and interconnected world, these meanings tend to converge. My art embraces these convergences, but is focused on the dissimilar conclusions that viewers can draw out of an image.

My drawings explore the choreography of line, the way it performs as it passes through space and transforms into a drawn memory. I begin with delicate copper wires that I knot and torque into suspended dimensional shapes. I draw the sequence of their shadows as I move their suspended forms across a space or alter the direction of cast light. As in a dance, they entwine, stretch, contract, and release. Each drawn line echoes the immediate past and links the first mark to the last. These marks accumulate to form palimpsests of movement. Their overlapping sequence is an

The artist Isamu Noguchi once stated, “You can find out how to do something and then do it or do something and find out what you did.” It is this philosophy that drives my studio practice.

I feel connected to the moments of my life that have left imprints in my mind, traces of events, objects, and thoughts that are still thick with color, energy, and purpose. My work takes on many forms, visually combining images from the present and the past. I compare what is remembered and forgotten in the everyday. Singular images hint at a possibility of narrative, but they are hazy, obscure, emerging from the organic energy of watercolor and oil paint.

My works are, in part, documentation of human tragedy, informed by my interest in history, historiography, and parallels in my personal past. They are veiled speculations, militaristic and mythical—pictorial preambles that explore the viability of a return to narrative in the wake of postmodernism, the atomic age, and the ever-expanding digital realm. My current process takes from photographs, satellite imagery, and video stills, and forcibly feeds them back into my paintings and installations to take that which has been distilled by historical method and reformulate it into a new apocrypha.

There is an urgency for me in the act of painting. I revere (and revile) the luscious melancholy of Americana and rococo scenes. Wistfulness is the fear of loss—seductive and guilty. In the trappings of comfort, are we sedated by pasts and futures that didn’t exist, and may never? Through art-historical and decorative motifs, I construct a visual language for the haunts of desire.

Haunting not in a ghostly way (though, perhaps), but in the sense of persistent, as though the possibility of losing my sight makes me a beauty seeker.

I’m interested in designating the painting space as an arena for addressing formal concerns. Often I establish surfaces, borders, or material expectations and then introduce a gesture that ruptures these. The broken idyll is a metaphor for our negotiation of the disconnection between fantasy and the reality that fosters that fantasy.