The figures in my work find themselves echoed throughout the paintings, attempting to connect, but failing to join and fulfill their sensual desires. Tender moments of touch are often displayed and repeated within these dreamscapes of skewed spatial perspectives and oddly vacant domestic rooms. With the tactility of thickly poured and splattered paint and the effervescence of luminously sprayed stencils, silhouettes of figures burst with divine ecstasy, often sensually interacting with other figures from a different realm. The emphasis on the figures’ faces and genitals,

I combine tropes of beauty with aspects of the monster to create female figures in which fascination and revulsion intersect. Beauty is a potent fantasy. At every level of culture, from Mattel’s Barbie to Botticelli’s Venus, the beauty of proportion, harmony, and unity of discrete parts has been celebrated. Nowhere more so than in the fashion magazine, from which I cull details—a pert nose, a set of gleaming white teeth, or blonde locks—to make paintings of gigantic malformed oddities fused from lumps of paint and scribbles of graphite.

In drawing from the traditions of both the grand portrait and the DIY genre of decorative pattern painting, my paintings start in a place of “pretty.” The subjects have a dysfunctional relationship with their environment and are increasingly violated by garish color, rough texture, and a surface sediment of opulent, store-bought, celebratory trash. Inspired by holiday photographs, family portraits, and the materiality of disposable decor, my paintings create a space for residual family nostalgia, providing a sense of familiarity and terror.