The overall theme of my work is a desire to understand people.

My edifice paintings are explorations of architecture as cultural landscape, combining old subjects and new media to arrive at views of contemporary life. By looking at buildings I can observe and understand the people who live (or have lived) there.

The Swimmers series is about miscommunication and good intentions gone awry.  I was first inspired by a 1928 life guarding handbook that illustrated the violent holds, chokes, kicks and punches used to keep victims from drowning their would-be rescuers. That two people could kill each other with their overlapping purposes and miscommunication is striking. Removed from their intended instructional context, the photos of grappling swimmers invited new unintended narratives that I could construct by re-contextualizing them with drawings, text, and photos of found objects. I especially liked the parallelism of discussing miscommunication through unfamiliar visual queues with inexact meanings.

I continued on this train of thought for Nature vs Nurture, a series of paintings about the motivations behind nurturing and caring for others. By superimposing 1950’s-era photos of subdued pet Mynah birds over bridge schematics I wanted to suggest a cultural manufacturing of responsibilities in order to fulfill a need to nurture. I suppose my own ambiguities about the roles of contemporary mothers are also present in this work, as the birds are being cared for to a point of incapacity—something I see in today’s over-extended moms and their over-indulged children.

My work begins with a photograph, either one I've taken or one repurposed. The inherent nostalgia of photographs from vintage books and magazines disarms viewers and generalizes my concepts by tapping into cultural ascriptions of objects and postures.  I incorporate enlarged and digitally altered versions of these photos into my work with polymer emulsion transfers and then scrape, cut away, and paint over them. I continuously experiment to improve techniques and combinations of materials; my current work combines photography, digital media, painting, printmaking, and drawing. This open-source approach means that I collect and hoard potentially useful things (e.g. old guano fertilizer sacks, vintage bed sheets, player piano paper, books) as well as potentially beneficial skills. If there is a tool around I want to know how to use it, just in case.