I was wandering through a refurbished bed-and-breakfast in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. I was ten years old. The building, formerly Daughters College, had been a nineteenth-century finishing school for girls. As I explored the bedrooms that were once dormitories, I noticed that the windowpanes had random dates scratched into the glass, along with names of students, suitors, and other scribbled sentiments. Later, I learned that long ago, these young, upper-class women had engraved this graffiti with their diamond rings. My fascination with this

My work is concerned with how it is created and how it can be perceived. The craftsmanship is built on personal preferences and meaningful aesthetic decisions. These decisions relate to my personal life, art history, and art theory. The work becomes a product of a specific time and place that gives insight into the history of its own making.

I am constantly inspired by patterns and prints, my travels, summertime, Instagram, interior spaces, my immediate surroundings, fashion magazines, textile design, and meeting new people. I have an iPhone full of screenshots, and sketchbooks, notebooks, and a studio wall covered in notes and clippings— my collections of visual stimulants. A seed from these images, a West African textile, a languid Miu Miu model, a Slim Aarons photograph of poolside decadence, inspire the vibe for each painting. I plan each piece around this initial idea by creating

I’ve never seen my father in real life. I know him only through family stories, photos, and digital screens. Painting allows me to explore my lost family’s Salvadoran history in order to understand my own biracial identity. These histories include the subjects of war, the recurrence of mental illness, and loss.

Represented in these shelter sites is the human navigation of survival. The process is illustrated in both content and composition. When our modern world comes to an end, and the world-without-us continues, only our surreal consciousness is left to manufacture the dystopia. I use different textures in painting to emphasize an object’s meaning. Some works are rendered as still lifes, with juxtaposed impasto styles, while others integrate images from the Internet as a means of mirroring the chaotic variety of the world. Taken as a whole,

I tell stories about the past, and about how the beliefs and technologies that shape our realities change. These stories are small.

I met a woman who had just visited her childhood home in rural Australia. She was often alone when she was little. Sometimes, she and her brother would climb the 8-foot hedge surrounding their house, scaling the dark, dry interior branches and then floating on top. I would like to tell that story.

My work relates to the rapid state of change we see in the world at large—war, terrorism, refugees, displacement, identity, and collapsing economies.

The gym is a place where everyday antics—sexuality, competitiveness (within and between the sexes), ego, and primal behaviors—are amplified in a stagelike environment where there is a hyperawareness of bodies in a public space. Engaging the politics of looking through both male and female gazes, we sneak glimpses of others in mirrors and through makeshift windows in gym equipment.

When considering the omnipresence of screens, it is clear that screen time is as much an integrated part of life as a form of escape from it. We are required to maintain a split consciousness between screens and physical space. My recent paintings feature images of NFL broadcasts, which combine the unpredictability of live television with the emotional investment of sports fanaticism, perhaps the last stronghold of television as a real-time shared event or collective experience.