STATEMENT OF WORK

Born in Boston into generations of New Englanders, I make visually saturated and materially dense paintings depicting the regionally and personally specific. To source my references, I cook whole meals; take trips to fish piers, markets, affineurs, and cheesemakers; scour the internet for historic cookbooks; and gently sort through my grandmother’s handwritten notes. I transcribe my grandmother's handwritten recipes alongside vintage Betty Crocker recipe cards, trompe l’oeil yet larger than life and loaded with materiality. By recreating inherited family recipes, markets, and kitchenscapes, I seek to understand and locate myself. My practice combines this genuine introspection with the awareness that my environment deeply informs my sensibility and the insight that “[l]ike so many Americans, [my family] was trying to construct a life that made sense from things … found in gift shops” (Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut). My paintings reflect this environment. I was raised surrounded by an amalgamation of WWII paraphernalia, family heirlooms, IKEA furniture, and animal-shaped knick-knacks from every antique store, vintage spot, and gift shop around, forming the textures and history of my life.  

Like this collision of objects and history, my practice is an alchemical exploration of acrylic paint: I pour, stencil, airbrush, sand, and render material into unexpectedly representational paintings. While my work may initially seem photorealistic, upon close viewing, the topographical surfaces of each canvas dissolve into color, shape, and texture. I employ a dichotomy of the hand, utilizing the explicitly handmade to its counterbalance, simultaneously denying the hand through processes of chance and intermediated mark-making. I consider the physical world around me as a formation of collaged pieces, colliding to assemble the textures it contains. In response, my paintings do the same, utilizing collage with paint. As I add glass beads, molding paste, and sand, they pass from two dimensions into three, becoming more object-like than flat compositions, pushing the boundaries and definitions of painting. 

By clashing together distinct paint languages, I disrupt the viewer’s expectations of coherence, calling attention to the mundane and asking more of everyday objects and cultural behaviors. As an artist, I ask, what is remembered and what is lost? Alltagsgeschichte: the history of everyday life; contextualizes my paintings as banal representations of the object-residue of time and stand-ins for larger questions. I look to discover my identity within the truths and fictions of culture-making; to digest the legacies of class, place, and history. I am the historian's unexpected assistant, an heir, and a translator. I create paintings that collapse generational visual culture, bringing regionally specific objects into circulation with a contemporary world. Unlike a historian, my work does not take final form as a thesis, but rather as a series of additional questions and observations bound up and investigated through the transformative qualities of painting.