My work arises from my fascination with the architecture of shopping malls, commercial offices, modernist buildings, and public transportation. I’m interested in these places and nonplaces as they relate to human daydreaming, artificiality, and the recognition of our visual sensitivities. I also draw from op art, children’s toys, and 3D animation. Through the integration of digital imaging, vector graphics, modeling, and animation I construct scenarios about these spaces in works that are both abstract and representational. I explore the line between the

In this most recent body of work, experimental film has become a major influence on how I approach duration in my subjects. While I paint, films are played on a continual loop in my studio, allowing me to operate between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film.

In my work, I use color and structure to deal with visual interplay. Inspiration comes from place, person, and music. Proportion and scale is crucial.

One color carries meaning. Two colors create harmony. Three colors create complexity.

Throughout my career, I have always found inspiration in the landscapes of home, narrowing the definition of the word over time from the sprawling fields and the vast industrial campuses of the rural Midwest to the length of the street on which I live and, now, to the view from the roof of my Chicago homestead. Dominating the compositions of my high-relief paintings are treetops, bursting with color, between blocks of buildings and houses. In my acrylic gouache works on paper, I elevate these trees from mere elements of a landscape to singular symbols.

This body of work began with my prolonged observation and study of clear glass objects stacked and suspended in a window greenhouse that is attached to my studio and home. What emerged from my engagement with this “still life” was the opportunity to examine the precarious relationship between seeing and knowing. Moving between painting, digital photography, and drawing, the resulting work is a hybrid form that suggests simultaneous realities, where appearances are fundamentally unstable and relational, and where reality is vulnerable to distortion both from within and without.

The city attracts me like a moth to a streetlight. Every street, building, and billboard presents dramatic possibilities. The subject fascinates me, and is the inspiration for much of my work.

These paintings express the personalities of places, and of the people who engage those places in the hopes of developing a meaningful relationship. They are part of a new project in which I am making one painting per month for twelve months, each inspired by the area around my Minnesota home. In terms of style, I think of my paintings as layering the figurative narrative of American folk art and the textural assemblages of abstract expressionism.

I come from a family of carpenters. My early education as an artist taught me the care of craft, love of tools, and pride in working with my hands. This history led to my interest in creating paintings that function as objects and that occupy space in a physical way.

As a woman of Lakota and European ancestry, raised among Native communities within urban American environments, I make work that explores cross-cultural intersections.