STATEMENT OF WORK

I’m interested in making pictures that are hard to know. Images that one can name but not place—moments that, despite their specificity, remain elusive and slippery. I draw from everyday objects, characters, and places to create imagery that is up for interpretation, stories that do not give away the plot. I paint with a controlled, illusionistic technique—encouraging viewers to linger on recognizable imagery. This clarity is undercut by the ambiguous atmosphere and obscurity of the image itself. My paintings reflect the discomfort of uncertainty—the tension between the known and the unknown, the familiar and strange.

This sense of tenuous familiarity is at home in our current cultural and political climate, characterized by the blurring of fact and fiction. In her book, "Doppelganger," Naomi Klein describes a sense of “collective vertigo” caused by the breakdown of intellectual authority, the rise of conspiracy, and the duplicity of deepfakes and online personas. I hope to echo this vertigo by allowing the viewer to feel both grounded and destabilized at the same moment.

I source material from both personal and digital archives, making use of technologies like Instagram and the Cloud that increasingly obscure the boundaries between private and public. I start a painting by collaging pictures from my grandmother’s photo albums and my camera roll with screenshots of movie stills, or images I find on forums and my feed. I choose images that feel familiar to me—often these are of family and friends. I like the imperfection and vulnerability of amateur photography— the awkward poses and uncomfortable expressions. I draw, of course, from my subjective experience—people and spaces that I do not expect to be recognizable or relatable. My interest, rather, is in blending my memories with images I am drawn to online to explore the slippery truth content of images and memory alike, especially as our personal lives are fragmented, reproduced and reframed as spectacle in the public realm of the internet.

My process is intuitive and improvisational; I often begin a painting thinking of certain images and influences and finish seeing others. Recently, I have been mimicking and appropriating my favorite artists. For example, in my painting "Perfect Blue," I collaged a still from the film, "All About Lily Chou-Chou" directed by Shunji Iwai, with a photo of my grandparents walking up a snowy hill. As I painted the winter landscape, I was reminded of Edvard Munch’s depictions of snow and began modeling my figures after his vague and amorphous characters. Each reference I make on the canvas reminds me of other unexpected images and influences—in this way, I follow the painting’s lead. I aim to explore not just the false clarity of personal and cultural memory but the permeable and layered memory of the painting itself.