STATEMENT OF WORK

We keep our histories through photographs, but also through oral stories. An example: My great grandmother said she was struck by lightning twice: the first one killed her and the second revived her. The fable becomes truer than fact as it is passed down through the decades and retold. Approaching the work through this lens, my paintings explore forms of myth-making. Family photographs, moments captured from a car window, or collected screenshots are distorted and collaged in Photoshop, serving as a point of departure. The paintings are constructed through distinct layers. Airbrushing imitates the subtle glow of light from a screen. Hard walls become slippery surfaces that give way to thick impasto. A transmutation occurs from photograph to canvas, allowing space for contradictions, multiple timelines, and a precarity of physical space. I think of painting as a process of amalgamation. Working from a personal taxonomy, several materials and images meet to collapse on the painting. Like the aftermath of a calamity, the process becomes a sort of sifting through what is left washed up on the shore: porcelain angels, foliage, tightly wrapped cellophane, ghosts. 

Biography infiltrates particular material choices: soybeans, seeds, glitter, grocery lists, bark, latch hook, and crochet are placed on the canvas. In Mississippi County, Maelstrom and the Angels, drywall repair tape is reread as cross stitch patterns. These patterns can exist as dots of paint, like the glowing pixels of a screen, or as seeds arranged on the bottom layer of a canvas, like ancient petroglyphs. By using recognizable symbols, tactile objects, and direct reference to photography,  I play with different notions of social memory surrounding seemingly mundane events such as wintertime or first communions. For me, the Raggedy Ann dolls in Paradox Lost for example, represent a particularly fraught myth of Americana. I question our capacity for sentimentality in a culture saturated with banal symbols. I’m interested in our new collective relationship to images and how we use them to construct our realities, in particular a distortion of our way of looking, perceiving, and remembering. The point of collapse between history and myth is what drives my paintings. (What is real? Is a photograph a fact?) This ontological instability as it relates to memory is the subject of the paintings.