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

Painting is a balancing act. It is no mean feat to merge the images of a snowy junkyard with scent memories of the souq, the feel of a fluttering luna moth and hum of white noise. That said, when worlds like these coalesce and, in turn, touch others, there is nothing sweeter.

77th Street is from a body of work called On Having Left You. It investigates the cycle of loss and revival that is very much a part of a given place, particularly the American city and its obsessive attempts to rebuke and abandon its history. The push and pull of deconstruction and reconstruction, which shapes the experience of space as we come to remember it and forget again, is consciously mirrored by my use of reductive drawing.

I began this series immediately following a long trip through South Asia, influenced by the fragmented remains of so many once-prominent temples. For me, seeing stacks of precious remnants in those sites contributed to a growing dialogue in my work—the accumulation of bits of histories long after they have lost their modernity.

I use my drawings and paintings as a means by which I can plot the absurdities of human folly and crises from an outsider’s perspective. Each piece can be read as a map on its own, or within a larger narrative, of not only space and the everyday events and people that fill space, but of the individual and his place in the bigger picture. My maps chart the landscape of the everyday; the ubiquity of pop and consumer culture, i.e. the seen, along with one’s individual secrets and feelings, namely the unseen.

I see my current work as the truth bent to perfection. Set within a meticulously designed world of vanity, beauty, intense color, and abundant pattern, my recent works evoke a carefully crafted stage rather than the happenstance of real life. Echoing fairy tales, Dutch genre paintings of the 17th century, and overly sentimental 19th century literature, these paintings illustrate adolescent girls and young women in scenes that play on romantic notions, such as the peril of curiosity, the potency of beauty, and the inevitable fall of innocence.

Our current culture overloads and bombards our senses with instant information, countless images, and distracting consumable objects. However, what is immediately seen and collected cannot be entirely comprehended. To truly understand our experiences we need time and space to reflect. I paint to counter the experience of a fast-paced, technologically saturated culture.

This work came from a desire to synthesize my dual roles of artist and mother. I collected images and specimens, preserved memories and commemorated family through the act of making drawings. Lovingly detailed graphite renderings of events or objects from our lives share the surface of the paper with flat areas of color and patterns denoting things less concrete but highly emotive: hopes, dreams, expectations, and illusions. The drawings reflect my tender feelings toward my children and my role as their mother, but also more somber aspects of family life like loneliness and anxiety.

I make abstract paintings that are rooted in embodied experience and psychological states. The color is a vehicle for moving between emotive states, and is often vibrant, juicy, and intuitive. Illusionistic holes reveal lower layers of shallow space and sometimes depict contemporary technological processes such as cropping, layering, and arranging. At other times, a hole becomes an eye, or begins to reference bodily or mystical forms of openness and blockage. What is interior and exterior often shifts within a single painting. Together, the paintings reference

what these paintings present is a haphazard chronicle of a self-making history, a history that has the ability to steal from us as makers, to resent us our intentions, to turn us against each other. it flees, and the responsible course of action appears to be to follow and record as possible. we are situated at a seemingly arbitrary crossroads between opposing forms of disappearance, carried forward as hostages to stories whose meanings remain unclear.