As a painter, abstraction is a language to tell a story obliquely and metaphorically, to offer a narrative hiding in plain sight. I’m interested in how histories become embodied experiences as a consequence of gender, family dynamics, and cultural ancestries. To explore these ideas, I create animated abstract paintings to suggest internalized states that are not easily categorized and situations that are both old and new. I want to create beauty and humor within my recognition of the intractable layering of history.
In my paintings, stripes convey patterns and cycles of history, disrupted by other patterns and illusionistic elements like strings that bind parts together, holes where air escapes, and anomalous fleshy forms creating pressure against flat shapes Drips, smears, and shifts between crispness and blurriness represent changing degrees of focus, drift , and obfuscation over time.
Art history informs my language of abstraction and illusion: the mix of flatness and perspective in early Renaissance frescoes; the transmutations of Surrealism; and the colorful animation of psychedelia and Pop. Graphic elements from material culture also shape how I construct an abstract vocabulary. For example, within traditions of Western image-making, stripes can indicate a rejected or problematic status, serving as code for outcasts from society. Incongruities—between geometry and the naturalism of trompe l’oeil, and between fictional gravity and factual flatness—refer to the complexity of internalized sensations and generational repercussions.