Dream State – 

Embodied expression, nature’s consciousness, and the transformational properties of time are overarching themes in my practice. Here, the concept of mythic time is contemplated visually through paintings that combine fabricated and observed reality with mutable narratives, much like what happens when we are in a dream state.

Painting becomes a performative ritual act that simultaneously functions as a challenge to artistic authority. In the visual language of this specific body of work, I contemplate the archetypal male figurative painting “genius,” mythologized throughout western art history. By embodying this type of painter, I intend formal choices that suggest works could have been created synchronously with historical figurative paintings and just found today. Through this intentional communion with a style of European painting heavily featured in museums and art history, I aim to bring a contemporary feminine perspective, subtle humor, and empathy into the forms and gestures of classically inspired figures.

Through a lighthearted veneer, these paintings of theatrical spaces examine deeper notions of sentimentality, desire, beauty, and power. Poetic situations emerge from mixing revered visual sources with entangled signs of masculinity and femininity. Ethereal environments emphasize the tension between idealized figures and visual allusions to the hushed violence of death, allowing paintings to exist between conflicting states, such as informed innocence, playful seriousness, perverse prettiness, clandestine sincerity, and contemporary nostalgia.

Some specific imagery and themes I explore include the reclining masculine nude through the feminine gaze and experience, woman as an archetypal hunter in control of her destiny and the world around her, and mythic time experienced through the atmosphere of the theater where nature and magic can coexist.