My paintings incorporate various images and pictorial modes to explore the evolving notions of memory, personal experience and self in the digital age. Works are inspired by disparate elements and combine a variety of found and personal photos, video stills and other references. These elements are incorporated into open color fields and atmospheres that speak to the temporal and ephemeral qualities of mediating technologies, particularly social media and digital innovations. My research is primarily concerned with how these technologies have so quickly affected the ways in which we remember, relate to each other, and understand as well as define our world. Recently these issues have led me to examine sociological texts by Sherry Tuttle and Nicholas Carr, alongside themes in the work of postmodern theorists like Jean Francois Lyotard.

I find painting an ideal format for exploring the tension between nonobjective and illusionary space, the gap between abstraction and figurative realms. In my work, gestural, wavelike painted passages often submerge a variety of images. Concealed images include objects cast as reflections in windows, distorted video stills and artificial elements such as mannequins and store displays. These images present a secondhand or mediated relationship to actual experience that calls into question how we define the real. During the painting process, images are blurred, scraped and layered with color to emphasize the complexity of defining authentic experiences. This fragmented approach to a painting’s subjects is meant to create a visual distancing where the seams of an image, what’s tenuously holding it together, are revealed.

I continuously examine how continental philosophy and critical theory grapple with the nature of reality, defining the basis and terms for such a complicated discussion. I see painting as fertile terrain for this dialogue, where the physical and immediate qualities of paint coexist with images and representations of the natural world. I am drawn to nature as an antidote to the distractions of the digital world and often find significance, meaning and harmony in the structures of tree branches or a lake’s wave patterns. The transcendental potential of the natural world, the symmetry and shapes inherent in forests, fields and bodies of water, make them an integral part of my work and its underlying focus, the investigation of what binds us together.