I make abstract paintings that wear known images like masks. While painting, I separate my subjects’ appearance from their real-world obligations. When I paint plants, for example, they cast implausible shadows and never quite recede into space. The air, water, and landforms in my work are more indebted to Paul Klee than Albrecht Dürer. I move these elements around the canvas as I develop a work’s allover composition. I am looking for queasy arrangements that undermine any obvious pictorial logic, but which nonetheless strike a haphazard balance. By dealing

In my work, I use strategies I might bring to making a mixed tape that asks the question “Can a specific subjective experience resonate in a shared emotion?” I find that different formal solutions and materials can coax out a specific overall feeling in the viewer. This may result in elements appearing to be in opposition to one another. However, these same elements provide an echo or remnant of the world around me. I gravitate to places, situations, and people with whom I’ve had direct experiences, which act as ruptures or deviations from my own perceptions, understandings,

I have been making intimately scaled paintings that explore notions of control through archetypes of landscape that shift eerily into still life. They address the history of representation and the relationship between visual structures and meta-criticism. The ambiguity of light, shifts in scale, the suggestion of an external presence, and the disorientation of perspective and category are important elements that manipulate the perception of familiarity and stability. The representations often hover on the side of the banal and mundane because of the apparent inactivity they

Fried bacon. Roux made from white flour and bacon fat. Silver fork scraping against a cast-iron skillet. Milk passing through a slotted wooden spoon. Salt, cracked pepper to taste. Hard-boiled egg, the yellow of the yolk. The bird-shit color of the burnt yolk. Ash-gray on golden crust, flecks of black. White crockery with a blue circle around the rim.

For nearly a decade, I have been producing abstract compositions that excavate surfaces, occupy spaces, and reverberate throughout environments. I maintain a democratic approach to creative exploration, giving myself the agency to mix and remix materials, themes, and content into graphically structured groupings with dissonant surfaces. My aesthetic investigation is driven by a critical engagement with mixed materiality, illusion, and spectacle. I cannibalize my temporal constructions— collecting, refurbishing, and reusing old fragmented elements in

There is no one truth, but there are many stories.

The link between the experiencing and imagining of nature is at the foundation of my practice. The landscape becomes a setting for imagined realities and personal references to outsider art, poetry, and folk art. Taking cues from Joseph Yoakum and Henry Darger, I map out poetic and highly stylized depictions of natural settings, where fiction and reality meet. In these compositions, intricate patterns elaborate a means to reinvent and question our relationship to nature. Ultimately, my pieces exist somewhere between reality and dreams, their intersection opening up a

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.