Through my work I explore the complex nature of desire and obsession. We often have a love-hate relationship with the things we desire. This can become especially complicated when that which we desire is out of our reach or perhaps doesn’t even exist at all. Many of our most deeply ingrained desires develop in childhood and adolescence. My work often deals with this love-hate relationship with our childish delusions—the perfect life, the perfect home, the perfect relationship—that have always existed in our minds. The figures in my work nearly always come from magazines or catalogues.

My current body of oil paintings explores the environments existing on the periphery that most people ignore. Strong emotions can be prompted by a place. Over time, ways of life shape and define people and the spaces in which they live. I am drawn to areas and structures that show character acquired from the history and memory of the people that formed that environment. Living in one place for an extended period of time provided me with a sense of local perspective that no outsider possesses.

I do not have the luxury of escape. In this century, in this moment, few of us do. Information piles up: the advertisements, the mechanisms, the media, the people. I am attached to it, in the midst of it, a part of it. However, as a painter, I am also a witness and a reactionary. The paintings speak of information explosions, where an entire environment can be physically contained in a seamlessly presented two-dimensional world. It is a reaction to the age of technology.

When the world began to feel a little too gray, I started walking. Sometimes on these otherwise ordinary walks I would notice something that felt special. Mundane pieces of the landscape, arranged just so, beckoned me to come closer, to look longer. These seemingly ordinary spaces became portals to something extraordinary: the space between day and night, between known and unknown, and between here and there. In these liminal spaces, I found magic. I decided to let go of my rules and I dove into this world of magic.

My current work focuses on my utopian places. The word “utopia” demonstrates two meanings at once: literally “no place” and “good place.” By acknowledging the word’s multiple meanings, I want the viewer to recognize the layers that exist below the surface of everything.

Many of my collages are based on patchwork quilt patterns because I’m drawn to grids, tessellations, and repeated shapes. I reinforce this repetition through colors and materials. Because patterns tend to be orderly and predictable, I like to add unexpected elements for humorous or ironic effect.

I’ve always been interested in drawing. There is a particular process to working with graphite on paper that I find solace in. It’s no coincidence that my work has always gravitated around the medium as it holds endless mark-making possibilities while still providing a familiar starting point from which I can enter each piece. All of my drawings start with a simple question: what happens if I do this on the paper?

Over the past several years, I have been investigating thresholds and breaking points in my work, both in subject and technique. A combination of manual and technological processes produce hybrid forms that blur the lines between found and made, the contemplative and the humorous. Engaged with the problems of both sculpture and painting, I explore visual phenomena observed in my immediate environment. Everyday life exists in the subject matter I bring to the studio, but also in the nature of my daily art-making practice.

I make square paintings of places, things, and ideas. Mostly, I just want them to be fun to look at.

I have no real interest in explaining them—the paintings exist on their own.

My paintings are a personal declaration aimed at ameliorating our modernity. When I paint, I compose visual anthropological essays that bridge past and present for a contemporary acculturation. The colors and symbols I use are adopted from many stations, ranging from folk traditions to street art. Further manipulation recontextualizes them as both graphic ornament and Esperanto. Initially, these paintings were organized according to open-source graphs describing patterns of social human interaction. They have become a way for me to filter the urgency and collective