STATEMENT
My main art practice is oil painting, and I explore the artifice in re-presentations of histories in popular culture. I use familiar imagery to engage viewers with their personal experiences, evoking a common memory and questioning one’s understanding of singular and collective concepts of nostalgia. I am interested in the role of the artist as mythmaker, playing with society’s visualization and understanding of histories through images and exploring concepts of nostalgia.
My works re-present personal and collective mythologies and question the validity of memory, history and the freedoms taken in their re-creation when constructed images of vaguely familiar, hypothetical pasts are created. Working in a collage-like manner, I reference a diverse collection of both historical and contemporary art and use highly rendered figures juxtaposed with flat graphic patterns, negative space and symbolism. By weaving together the past and the present, the personal and the shared, these fragmented histories of the collective psyche form narratives that contrast contemporary popular culture with the aesthetics of memory. Painting as illusion parallels the concept of memory, for it is not just simply what we remember that shapes our histories but how we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.