I investigate simple objects as cultural interfaces through which I navigate accord and discord. When trying to unravel complex issues, I am instinctively drawn to things that connect to my personal narrative as a point of departure: a comb, a piece of cloth, or a strand of hair. Charged with agency, objects have the mysterious ability to reflect or absorb us. I find my image, my personal story, in an object. But it is also the object’s ability to act as a rhizome, the multiple ways in which it can be discovered or read, that draws me in.

Mine is the liminal space between humor and pity. Instead of declarations, I make suggestions; it’s not my place to tell you what to think, after all. Really, I’m more interested in the foundational elements of storytelling, often obscuring the coherence or totality of a work in favor of something a little more scattered. My paintings mimic the form of story, but withhold any meaningful exchange of ideas. I call them impotent narratives. The structure is compromised: we’ve reached this recognizable end, but we’re not quite sure how.

I have a nomadic nature, and for the past five years have lived in five different cities. As a result, for the past three years my work has been devoted to a personal reflection of landscape through the use of mixed wet and dry media on paper. Reliant on the cyclical nature of time, the landscape holds the promise of building and the compromise of erosion. Continually dotted by our patterns of impermanent, decorative structures, an affirmation of spectacle is renewed. As a painter, I am particularly interested in the expansive qualities of these tropes.

This work is driven by questions of a metaphysical nature and notions of spirituality, such as how design and orchestration within nature affects our consciousness, and how extraordinary geometries within nature’s design demand the consideration of intelligent design. I am interested in the augmentation of naturally occurring systems through the application of manmade structures. In my work I combine forms that are organic in creation with carefully placed and predetermined mark-making.

These paintings are based on photographs of models, and engage in a significant filtration process. Physical facts are inevitably simplified and distorted, as real-world signifiers are transformed first into a model, then a photograph, and finally a painting. Some of these works examine the many ways Americans have experienced the Iraq war, and address issues of power and powerlessness as manifested in human interaction during wartime. Model figures and toy dolls represent the housewife, the student, the businessman, the soldier; all occupy the uneasy utopia of a model world.

The term ‘Southern Gothic’ is partly defined as the exploration of socially induced issues and the act of revealing the cultural character of the American South. With my current body of work, I reinterpret various places on the periphery of many Southern towns and cities that are, for lack of a better phrase, on the fringe of society. As historian Bill Ferris states, “The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.”

My paintings investigate how humor facilitates the exposure of anomies, the social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values within a community. Cultural insight is layered behind comedic intent by way of archetypes built out of saturated transparent forms. Humor is not the end, but a means to afford access to topical issues and provides a fulcrum point between two simultaneous but oppositional viewpoints.

My paintings are intricate systems of display that house arrangements of various studio artifacts such as scraps, found materials, and pieces of my children’s discarded drawings. Many elements are of lowly origins, massproduced remnants that are resuscitated within my paintings. Over the course of developing a painting, small, seemingly insignificant moments accumulate to form larger patterns. Intricate cutouts, paired with disrupted patterns and layered, gestural marks, create an unsettling tension. Disguised Xs and Os indicate hugs and kisses, but also uncertainty.

I make paintings that traffic in ideas from politics to social culture, from serious to not so serious (funny). I count amongst my influences the spirits of Mark Twain, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Kerouac, Erich von Stroheim, Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Ernest Hemingway, Gloria Swanson, Maynard G. Krebs, W.C.

Most of my compositions consist of simple bands of colored and textured paint that overlap to form a web of color with a range of surface varieties. Through the numerous applications of paint evolves a complex layer of textured pattern. With my obsessive working process, I am able to compile paint of different consistencies to form a complex object that focuses on the fluid qualities of paint itself.