My recent work takes as its starting point ambiguous locations, both familiar and unrecognizable. These are views of wooded areas, nondescript parks, and edges of city streets that could be anywhere. Dull and flat color accompanies unrefined handling of material in my attempt to make a work that is at once brutal and serene.

An obsessive fascination with impermanence manifests in my work in many ways. The luminous instances of light and color one can see in gems, through prisms, and in refracted light are examples that drive me to make paintings that evoke these kinds of phenomenological events, albeit materially. I find pleasure, wonder, and reminders of mortality when observing these instances. Everything flickers and nothing lasts.

Being alive is strange and buzzy. Most of the time, I feel like an overly sentimental bipolar bear or something, stomping around hoping some golden will stick to me. I play with toys and mistakes. I grab at dirt and discard in an attempt to fashion some semblance of a feeling I once had or cull some poetic out of a rag or stick. The things I make are highly responsive and seem to arrive at a disjointed space that sits on top of my experiences. I am concerned with the sense of the thing and what it feels like. I want to access abandonment with my hands, letting them run

Craft is a form of conscientiousness. For me, the verbing of craft has always been a way to refute the either/or binaries that have circulated in culture. Using collage as a system to put together crafted material forms bearing an array of cultural references, I acknowledge that my work questions its own mythology and history. I reference the sampling of the database, the structural forms of modernism, grand narratives of romanticism, and the pictorial space of medieval works. I accept and take pleasure in the overlapping histories of textiles, design, and painting without

The mugshot portraits are my latest effort to combine pop art iconography with photorealist painting. With this series, I have gone back to the roots of photorealism, a genre that emerged from the pop art movement of the 1960s.

The subjects of the paintings are notorious criminals whose mugshots are often seen in various media outlets, becoming a familiar part of our popular culture. I enlarge the scale to portray the subjects as larger-than-life characters, as an observation and reflection on our voyeuristic, violent, and pop-culture-obsessed society.

The primary medium of this body of work is duct tape (also known as duck tape)—pressure-sensitive adhesive material that historically evolved from strips of cotton duck to the more commonly recognizable scrim-backed tape that we all know today. By using this material, I draw on the tape’s historical lineage with canvas as artist material as well as its cultural and literal plasticity as a “fix-all” material. Notions of scarification and entropy are evident in the scrapes and abrasions that cut into the works’ surfaces, and expose my aesthetic allegiance

In my landscape paintings, I use overlapping and contradictory information in order to incorporate multiple meanings, inviting the viewer to become an active participant by interpreting the work. Many of my paintings feature potential destinations in the far distance, welcoming viewers into deep illusionistic space while simultaneously resisting their entry with passages of paint that sit on the surface of the canvas or panel.

Painting for me is as much about technique and process as it is about the final artwork. To illustrate: Each painting embodies an element of chance and less regard to a premeditated outcome. My goal is not solely to create new imagery, but coax the painting to life through the gestures of its making.

I create using what I call an “anti-maquette” process, where the model does not lead to an expected result so much as it provides conditions for one. Sculpting the path of a visual landscape by bending, shaping, and warping a material, I emphasize a nonlinear, unpredictable relationship between one plateau of transformation and another. Materials offer resistance when manipulated, forcing me to navigate unknown territory through each object’s creation. The specific nature and preconfiguration of each material becomes a historical fact I have to wrestle with.

My paintings are part of a dialogue with the beginnings of abstract expressionism, distilling an episode in art history in which Jackson Pollock took the rhythms of Thomas Hart Benton’s portrayal of the figure and reenacted them with his own body, creating expansive furling gestures. The resulting skeins of paint can be interpreted as man moving through the landscape.