I make paintings to process contradictions between personal memory and cultural artifacts, and to explore the ways that color and image can be conduits for psychological environments.

I am interested in the symbols and icons that have built mythologies around the landscape of the American West. I use these images as tools to meditate on the alienation and shame I feel from the daily cultural expectations driven by the belief of American exceptionalism. The works are stages where landscapes become curtains, birds become headstones, and the sun repeatedly rises and sets.

In using carved foam reliefs and shaped fabric surfaces, alongside painted environments, I think about how an image’s relationship to an object’s surface has culturally and historically been used as a memory device to share knowledge and stories.

These objects represent sets, props, or counterfeit reliquaries that act as repositories for memory and myth. With this work, I’m speaking to the ways that storytelling through image making can influence accepted historical truths, and how this can shape belief systems.