“Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one’s private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of the self and the world of objects and events. Instead of signifying surrender to caprice and disorder, it affords our sole demonstration of a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing. Because experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of

I make paintings based on contemporary mythologies. Mining the proliferation of images on the Internet, I select those that are rooted in spirituality, competition, masculinity, and patriotism. I grew up in a digitally filtered culture with an overwhelming fear of failure brought on by idealized imagery. The Internet, movies, video games, and cable television are my outlet, allowing me to vicariously experience everything I was too timid to try for myself. These paintings are pathetically immortalized stand-ins for all the things I never did or could ever do.

My artwork is informed by the shifting and temporal nature of my surroundings and the traces that are left as time passes. Specifically, I am interested in moments and sensations that are not fully understood because they are so fleetingly glimpsed or experienced.

My work explores man’s elemental interaction with his environment, particularly in the measured way he builds and inhabits shelter. Influenced by the forms and materials of primitive earth dwellings, my visual language is grounded in architecture and repetition. Like the building process, the paintings develop through stacking, weaving, and assembling simple forms. In addition to referencing the physical structure of a home, the textures and patterning of the paintings suggest woven cloths or quilts, also symbols of protection and comfort. I make paint from

The abandoned mills and tanneries of my youth in the Northeast, with their rust and gray tones, inform my visual and aesthetic language. These residual sites serve as the foundation for my work, which allows for their reinterpretation as abstracted images.