As an artist, I make paintings that exist in the sliver of space between abstraction and representation. I look to the lived daily experience of the present coupled with the artifacts of the past. My work compresses time into the surface of painting, that old technology. Increasingly, flora, fauna, and natural phenomena hold my attention, as I wrestle with this imagery that we daily experience through our technology. Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet.

 In 2014, I traveled to Vietnam, beginning my indeterminate synthesis of traditional Vietnamese painting styles and the European canon. The marginalized bodies I depict render conflicting, complex feelings into sources of power and reclamation. My paintings materialize ephemeral experiences in order to reflect on and remember them in their ecstasies and agonies. They are ways of processing my identities and celebrating the worlds my friends and I construct and inhabit.

 My studio is filled with scraps. Heaped in stacks of unsorted bins, they are the remnants of over twenty years of making and living. Survey of the scrap pile: A doodle-ridden restaurant napkin A stained worktable covering littered with ambiguous notes A crusty, psychedelic palette scraping A scribbled landscape from my kindergarten journal A used bit of masking tape edged with paint A large, wadded-up drawing made in a fury one night last summer

 The summer of 2020 brought chaos to the world. We were faced with a global pandemic and searching for peace and justice for people of color. The inquisition of Josie Love Roebuck’s heritage came into play during the Black Lives Matter movement: her identity, experiences, fears, concerns, and what she would like to change were thrown into the spotlight. Roebuck’s process addresses the contemporary complexity of identifying as biracial, where symbolizing pain and triumph, exclusion and acceptance, is achieved by layering fabrics and patching together portraits.

 107 My work investigates the intersection between the contemporary and the past to give agency to forgotten people, places, and cultural schisms. I incorporate discarded items like photos, thrifted clothing, and found objects from my life into the medium of painting. My paintings act as caretakers of these mementos, imbuing the work with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia through a combination of paint, sewn fabric, and collage fastened to canvas. In reusing found elements, I breach ecocriticism and throwaway culture, guaranteeing that each reclaimed memento is once again active.

 My work deals with color and identity. My goal is to compare ideologies about race, stereotypes, and belief systems to everyday colors and the perception of these colors in our environment. I consider my work to be a form of visual communication that uses simplicity and depth to express social and ethical issues. I want to create a conversation between the personal and public by using color and composition to express mood, situation, and ideas. By placing people and objects in common and uncommon situations, I can deal with specific subjects from various perspectives.

 Scratchers is an ongoing series of quilts modeled after scratch-off lottery tickets found on downtown Atlanta’s sidewalks and in its corner stores. The transformation, laborious and precise, is a commentary on the neoliberal failure of social service. The lottery ticket as a symbol, discarded and ripped apart, is the future relic of a system that has not yet fallen. It represents a personal conflict, as the lottery directly funds my tuition through a state scholarship.

 My work is influenced by my personal experiences with civil wars and migration. My paintings bring attention to the effects of exploitation of people and the environment. Migration, civil strife, nationalistic mythologies, and climate change are the result of the pursuit of power by the few over the many. My role as an artist is to expose how these interconnected dynamics increase the power of oligarchies.

 My work portrays resilient female protagonists who reflect the bravest version of my inner self. Entranced or beholding, they traverse a variety of ecosystems with assuredness and curiosity. Approaching this work from an environmentalist and feminist perspective, I explore connections between women and nature. Plants and animals are rendered as defined, sculptural forms, exuding the same clarity with which the women navigate the landscape.

Jeremiah Jossim’s work speaks to a deep reverence for the American landscape, but also questions the privileges of recreation, tourism, and who has the right to explore and live alternatively in this country. His practice is deeply concerned with our manipulation of the environment and the ever-growing imbalance that has come to define the Anthropocene. Through examining our relationship with the landscape, his paintings investigate the shape and the feeling of the land, and explore the landscape’s psychological effect on our personal sense of place.