Statement

I am a painter and storyteller who explores joy, wonder, playfulness, and humor as modes of resistance, as wellsprings of connection, as antidotes to despair, as grounds for our shared humanity. My intimately detailed portraits honor chosen family, memorialize moments of bliss, and elevate the minutiae of the everyday. By sharing my own stories of trauma and self-discovery, I celebrate vulnerability, invite conversation about the often stigmatized, and foster communion and healing.

For years, my art was rooted in trauma. Sublimating pain into paint, I visually conjured the demons I battled. My compositions were dominated by dark color palettes, screaming faces, tendrilled monstrosities. Harnessing this hurt was cathartic, but reviving ghosts of the past inevitably took an emotional toll. The process of painting became arduous and excruciating, like each time I put brush to canvas, I was carving into my own flesh.

I want to think beyond what I’m resisting, opposing, fighting against, and instead consider what I actively want to embrace. Migrating away from the destructive, and toward the affirmative and life-giving, serves as an enactment of the kind of imagination necessary for envisioning liberated futures.

With oil paint layered over vibrant acrylic underpaintings, my art not only visually captures moments of joy, but feels viscerally joyful to create. I deliberately allow the vivid orange tones of my underpaintings to shine through, permeating each piece with a radiant glow that physicalizes the affect of ecstatic delight. In depicting the people, places, and memories I love, I explore the constellation of relationships that constitute the self and the expansive kinship webs woven by free will.

In my paintings, whose compositions evoke a Gen Z social media vernacular, I investigate how digital technology mediates and warps the way we remember and experience life, and how art can recover slowness and presence. We are too often alienated from the “now,” trading awareness and appreciation of the present for digital longevity. We take a snapshot to ostensibly “remember” a moment, which really just enables us to forget. The pockets of quotidian joy get lost in an amorphous sea of pixels, abstracted into data, rarely to be revisited.

I harness the protracted, laborious process of painting to revive these fleeting moments, to dwell inside them, to elongate their lifespans. To me, painting serves as a practice of intimacy and attunement, a willingness to approach the world with stillness and wonder, a desire to seek poetry in the prosaic. I meticulously render the details of each scene to bestow dignity upon the seemingly trivial, to unveil splendor in the ordinary. Honoring a photograph with close attention and metabolizing it into paint on canvas is an act of care, of reverence, of devotion. 

An emphasis on levity and playfulness is not a flippant dismissal of the suffering that touches us all. On the contrary: the backdrop of hardship is precisely what brings the importance of joy to the fore. My practice is greatly informed by my experience with disability: I live with Long Covid and an array of psychiatric disorders. My body – and the bodies of so many – carry the crushing weight of racism, abuse, sexual assault, climate catastrophe, and countless other attacks on our individual and collective spirits. I choose to respond to this trauma with a ferocious and irreverent joy, an insistence upon the right to thrive.

Joy is what emerges from having lost and having something to lose. Joy is what empowers us to resist the injustices of the present and open our imaginations to new horizons. Joy is what galvanizes us to fight and go on. Joy is what binds us together.