STATEMENT OF WORK

        My paintings explore forms of myth-making, often highlighting ritual and family history. They reference stories that range from Milton’s Paradise Lost to the myth of El Tio, a lord of the underworld prayed to in mines in Latin America. Coming from a Catholic background, the depicted rituals began as first communions, and then extended into social rituals like prom, Christmas, Halloween, and yearbook photos. 

        Family photographs often serve as a point of departure. I use these emotional documents to reconstruct anecdotal histories. As a child I spent most school breaks with my family in Peru, among mountains and mining towns in the Andes. These desolate and scarred landscapes influence the visual language I employ when considering land, colonialism, and their intertwined history. 

        I see textiles, so intimately connected to the home, exuding memory and history. As Mary Lee Bendolph once said, “Old clothes have spirit in them. They also have love.” My paintings with textiles illustrate this tactile history and embrace the embedded sentimentality within these found objects. I also often create my own latch hooks and embroideries to later sew onto the canvases. 

        The highway has been a locale of interest in terms of myth of Americana. Often referenced as a site of freedom and an endless network of connection, it is also sinister in its endless gray roads. Speaking of the difference between Disneyland and its parking lot, Baudrillard wrote, “The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total…solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile.” Small studies of roadkill and blurred vistas aim to contrast the romanticism of the highway with its loneliness. 

        The Supermarket is also explored in many paintings. It is captivating in its mundanity. Between rising inflation and persistent supply chain issues the supermarket has become a place of anxiety.  Yet, there is beauty in this daily chore: its mesmerizing color coded aisles, the seductive graphics, and the sale signs. It is a place of desire. The Carvel Cake smiles back at us. 

        The semiotic language at work borrows from ideas in Baudrillard’s Simulation Simulacra. The animals depicted in the work are often objects: a swan as a nightlight, for example, or the statue of a bird in a Victorian fountain next to a pigeon.  Considering the demotion from living creature to plastic product, my paintings explore the contradictions in our relationships to these knick-knacks.  There is usually a joke, and it is often tragic. There is an interest in the mundane, the romance of dollar store objects and the sentimentality underpinning a tchotchke. Tackiness is embraced, in an attempt to amalgamate the sacred and the banal. The work revels in paradox.