Through the physical act of painting and the still life genre I bring focus to subjects that are often overlooked in order to evoke a sense of interiority from their arrangement, use, and context. These set ups evoke narratives of my own personal and intimate experiences, through the organization of specific objects of culture and everyday use that are composed to create new relationships. The inherent familiarity of these objects and settings invites viewers to make connections between that which is deeply personal as well as shared, like painting my “I ♥ My Mom” coffee mug. It can hold multitudes from the kitsch and ubiquitous, to the sentimental, or intimate and immemorial.

The shallow depth of my paintings provides an experience of closeness by flipping a downward view of a horizontal surface, like a table or the ground itself, up onto the vertical wall, presenting a mesh of everyday activities into a place of import for further consideration. Paintings like Desk View conflate the studio, the domestic, and the virtual as the viewer is invited to see everything on the table that the Zoom viewer cannot. A table full of tools, refuse, books, drawings, and clutter shows an accumulation of a physical and mental space that juggles so many aspects of life.

Painting fuses and forms ideas in a physical way, through image, color, material, and history. A sense of totality is created through the painting, and one’s unique experience and relationship with it. Working within the genre of still life allows me to create relationships beyond the represented images, it also allows me to be in conversation with paintings and human experience across time. The every-day is a rich subject to dive into, extending beyond the access point of the familiar image, into bigger questions about our humanity and psychology, as it creates space for shared connections across differences of all kinds.