Through my paintings I explore paranoia, daydreaming, and curiosity with a playful bending of space, time, and bodies. Informed by my suburban Midwest upbringing and a sensibility toward world-building, I rely on domestic motifs to establish immediate access points for the viewer, which I then transform into bizarre narratives and invented environments. The figures I depict are desperate to escape their residential reality to either find connection or snoop on their neighbors, but first they must navigate a world that is familiar yet strange. Despite repeated invitations into the paintings through open doors, saccharine colors, and idyllic lawns, both the figures and the audience are kept at a distance by impenetrable fences, simplistic landscapes, and claustrophobic architecture. Ultimately, this process exposes an underlying tension, as the resulting picture is simultaneously comforting and disconcerting, outdoors and indoors, human and animal, day and night, and intimate and remote.