STATEMENT OF WORK

My work delves into the ways we experience our most personal images. How do we hold them, alter them, imagine or escape them? Why do we revisit them over and over again? I explore my own memories, the collective memories of my family, and worlds I have created, doing so with a critical and sentimental hand. With heavy influence from photography, I point to the role of image as storyteller, collector, historian, and deceiver.

Through depicting objects such as Polaroids, slides, televisions, and digital images, I illustrate the change in recent history of the photographic image, and its exponential influence on our perceptions. With these images, themes such as solitude, introspection, the relationship between humans and the environment, destruction and creation, mental health, and place emerge. I also paint nostalgic items and places such as childhood homes and toys. Recollection is a key facet of these pieces, noting repeatedly that memory is sacred but malleable, influenced by context, experience, and time. Each time we remember, something is altered or something new is gleaned.

While looking discerningly at the past, I also imagine possible futures - painting dilapidated buildings and post-apocalyptic ruins. This body of work teeters on the edge of contemporary decay and future destruction. In these spaces of abandoned malls and grocery stores, possibility and inevitability are blurred, and we are left to determine whether this journey is real or imagined, linear or cyclical. By paralleling works that look at different timelines, I posit the viewer as a passenger in a narrative, the determiner of how they have arrived.