BIOGRAPHY

My paintings are amalgams of incidents and real places dislocated in time and space, realistically rendered but on the verge of abstraction. I am engaged in the intersection of perception, the built and natural environment and art, and my intention is to make paintings which not only question the conventions of the landscape and built interiors in art but tests out new possibilities for the genre in an age of digitally mediated experiences of nature and the built environment. I am interested in creating compositions that appear to be confounding fictions with each painting presenting what appears to be factual, yet is rife with association, ambiguities, and transmutations. I am fascinated with discovering the disquiet in the midst of mundaneness.

I create paintings from photographs I take of mundane interiors of public spaces: hotel and apartment lobbies, TV and movie sets; spaces contrived to look habitable but resolutely lacking human presence. I intentionally distort the actual physical reality in a multitude of ways; they contain both the specificity of detail and the void of the spaces. Because these contrived environments are rendered faithfully but cropped and decontextualized they are unidentifiable, suggesting that even the most lucid presentation of facts is distorted, incomplete, provisional. The images play on the edge between realism and illusion, in that tension between what one knows and what cannot be identified.

My newest series is from apartment lobbies in sections of Los Angeles. I photographed from the outside glass lobbies and utilized reflections of things on the street superimposed over the interiors, so that one can’t place where one is located and what is real and what is not. And there is the idea of a lobby, rife with many associations, a waiting area, a staging area, a netherland.