My painting practice lately seems to address the notion of theatricality in an art production operation, but is ultimately one facet of a larger, general practice. While the images always rely on the tool of representation (often of the mass-produced objects/ephemera that have woven themselves into the most intimate moments that might now constitute a personal history), the varying levels of commitment to depiction (or the sometimes stacked layers of imagery) nod toward a sense of self that frequently wavers.

My paintings resist the urge to sit still. Appearing direct and haptic, solid and precarious, compressed and energetic, my work exists at the meeting point of painting and idiosyncratic form, proposing questions of perception and categorization. A seemingly straightforward formal abstraction may also appear to be a letterform, a window, and ultimately a physical object that has a unique relationship to the space it occupies and the objects that surround it.

My current body of work consists of mixed-media paintings created from an often indistinguishable combination of acrylic, screenprint, and collage on canvas. While reflecting on the broad history of abstraction, I’m interested in appropriation as an approach to nonobjectivism. Reproductions and advertisements of works by other artists are meticulously dissected and reconfigured into repetitive patterns and dense structures. Fragmentation, intricate layering, and the juxtaposition of textures and rhythms help produce these complex compositions. While my

These paintings come from observations of landscape and architecture, but even more so from the spaces in-between. I focus on a forgotten pile of bricks, the way you can only see through a fence at just the right angle, the slow evolution of a construction site in its own grassless void, the privacy fence made of sheets of plywood leaning against a chain-link fence, and, how, meandering down a tiny side street, you can be pleasantly surprised that someone thought it a good idea to paint their stucco house, fence, shed doors, and cement wall all the same color, to turn it all into

When we look at Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, why don’t we see the viewer reflected in the mirror? This question inspired my interest in a painting’s ability to convey and distort multiple realities. I am concerned with a kind of imagery that is involved with framing experience. The narratives in my work incorporate viewers and their space as an extension of the space inside the painting. I do this by depicting spatial loops and by using parallel mirrors and other devices for representing infinity.

My art is the synthetic colliding against history,
domestication, refinement, and germination,
nothingness, absence, place-holding, base,
origins of recipe, repetition, and memory,
hierarchy of beliefs in moments present,
class schema and academic structure,
authorship, authenticity, labor, origin,
transforming minutia into grandeur,
a found common object alphabet,
obfuscating a precise ending,
cosmic mosaic architecture,
retinal ground psychedelia.
acting without allegiance,
increments of exchange,

Meandering line, color and its potential for surprise, repetition, figure and ground—these are the grammar and syntax that guide me. The direction of my paintings is created through a process of action and reaction, intention and accident, intuition and thought, the push and pull between presence and absence. In a world saturated with images, I hope to create paintings that resonate emotionally and communicate beyond language.

My recent work explores how primary elements (line, shape, color) may be manipulated to provide an impetus for personal analogy. Often, there is an insinuation of symbolism in the work. The suggestion of a symbol-like image or icon elicits viewers’ personal, subjective conceptualizations of potential meanings within the perceived “work of art.” Using a reductive visual language, I emphasize formal and material relationships, thus foregrounding the tangible, physical object against the more elusive, intangible dialogue occurring between an active viewer and the objective image.

For years I have made paintings intended to appear to move in ways similar to how time feels. In doing so, I learned that each brushstroke could fully occupy its own rhythm, suggest a decisive direction, and assume a specific velocity. Eventually, these marks became so malleable and playful that they began to misbehave and carve out their own territories.

All my drawings tell a story, and stem from a deep love of illustration’s storytelling power. Ghosts, folklore, and memory commingle in my work. The red motifs come from my greatgrandmother’s sketchbooks: she painted traditional Pennsylvania- Dutch decorations for tins, chairs, and glass paintings that I continue to adapt and expand, creating atmospheres for my figures to inhabit. In creating the patterns that become havens for my figures, I reference the past, in hopes of connecting to the women who came before me.