STATEMENT OF WORK

       I make paintings about the exhausted, who only desire to not be exhausted, whose land is exhausted, and even though it is not their land, they are the land and the dirt their world is built upon.  These people are my family. Layered with coupons, mementos, found objects and family photos that repeat and degrade across different paintings, my practice explores the totality of the world but expressed through the local and familial. 

     Landscape is more than trees and sky, it’s about a field of experience, external and internal, political and personal. It’s about the morning glories I see bloom above the strewn trash, it’s about my mom being worried about where she is going to live next year, it’s about the liquor store my aunt walks to every day.       

     The absurdity and violence of the world is banal and obvious and is held in mundane materials like the supermarket coupons layered into my painting.  These coupons, like Dutch still life paintings, are colorful, organized natures completely abstracted from the violence and manipulation that created them.  Through the process of layering, tearing, and painting, this violence and exhaustion is exercised.  Cycles of decay and regeneration imbue the painting with a memory, a history, a surface, and an alchemy of accident. This creates an aura of the land’s persona and the communities that inhabit it.