My work is about things hiding in plain sight.
My recent work involves paired paintings based on found photographs. I seek to reinvest these discarded mementos with meaning by looking at them very closely, and spending several months slowly reconstructing them. These pictures of people living their lives are absorbing, and the longer I look, the more I see. Painting disposable images brings out significant details -- a cut-off figure, a camera angle, a pattern on the couch -- and I seek to make connections from work to work based on these moments of discovery.
While my small paintings are as true-to-life as I can make them, my installations touch on the world of the imagination: utopia (a wall-sized, interactive magnetic mural), an idyllic island (a mural accompanied by a stereoscopic viewer), and the ghosts of disappearing landscapes (slides projected onto mist). Whether working on small paintings of photos or large paintings of landscapes, I look at how people situate themselves in the world -- how we seek, lose and become lost, and try to preserve the things that matter.
