Throughout my career I have been influenced by anachronistic images of fashion and personal objects. My paintings and needlepoint works recontextualize outmoded styles and give them new meanings. I paint images of often headless people, their personal objects and interior spaces that indicate complex psychological and social relationships with one another. Without the head, the viewer sees the clothed body not as a portrait but as a collection of objects, and patterns. I am interested in the surreal connection between realistic subject matter and flat repetitive pattern.

 My artwork examines the impermanence and fragility of the natural world and the objects within it. Using my own imagery, I create landscape paintings that capture a universally held notion of what an idyllic landscape is or should be. While I am interested in portraying an ideal space, it is also important that viewers can see that the place I am depicting does not exist in our world. In order to heighten this sense of a manufactured construction of place, I intentionally deconstruct and fracture elements of the landscape.

 I construct bloated forms that reference the visuals of youth. Comprised of panel, faux fur, found fabric, fiber, papier mâché, and handmade textiles, each piece takes on a creature-like presence that recalls the hypothetical version of a forgotten childhood object.

 It is a curious fate for the life of a building. A hierarchy exists between preserving some styles of architecture versus keeping historical or cultural continuity.

Certainly, some architectural forms are favored over others. Some undergo many visual iterations (renovations) while others will not stand the test of time. I want viewers to make connections between the colors, lines, textures, and forms in my artwork and those found in the constructed environment.

 By embracing a maximalist aesthetic, my work incorporates archival research, personal secrets, and pubescent gay boy glamour. Through appliqué, embellishment, and dye processes I seek to create a stimulating yet jarring experience, while creating a world that is both familiar and inherently strange to the viewer. Thrift store cast-offs, hobbyist craft supplies, and saturated drawings are reassembled into a cast of characters and costumes that balance the line between ghost, creature, and friend.

In my paintings, I have been remixing symbols from the past and present, connecting visual threads that run from antiquity and the Italian Renaissance to craft traditions—to archetypes in folklore, theater, dreams, and nature. My work aims to consider Western imagery through a feminist lens. It opposes the idea that progress in history is a straight arrow, but sees it rather as a winding timeline that overlaps, loops, often omits, and repeats.

I make figurative oil paintings that engage the myths that have shaped the tenets of my personal philosophy. Pulled from sources as varied as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Wilco lyrics, Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the comic books of Grant Morrison, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and blues legends from the Mississippi Delta, my paintings examine my relationship with the archetypes inherent in these stories. The snapshot quality of frozen action tends to suggest a narrative rather than provide any real string of events, while the color interplay provides the closest thing to

To the ancient Greeks, daemons were spirit guides and forces of nature. They existed between mortals and deities. When I was younger, I feared being possessed by the much different Christian demons and being watched by voyeuristic, spying specters in some kind of limbo, with the old curandero acting as a medium. Now I feel nepantla—“a psychological, liminal space between the way things had been and an unknown future . . . a space in-between, the locus and sign of transition”—where “realities clash, authority figures of the various groups demand

The world that my work depicts is an alternate yet familiar universe, where one might feel at once incredibly comfortable and totally repelled. I pull the imagery for my paintings from Internet ads, cell phone pictures taken in the studio, stock art, and stills from YouTube videos. I edit down and manipulate the source material, eventually finding a way for sometimes very disparate elements to live together and redefine themselves.