the assistants (triptych)

My practice circles an experience of how space takes up a place inside of us, where images can unfold and form their own inner geographies. I think of my paintings as beginning with a gesture of laying-out a between-space, where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, but also grow into, actual places, events and geographies. Following this movement between inside and outside—an outside at once mundane and spiritual—flimsy and ephemeral ‘inner’ sensory images, affects, and visions meet ‘outer’ landscapes of experience, while collective histories become fragmental archives of image-events. Painting, for me, follows a movement back and forth between inside and outside, with the body in the middle—the medium of this movement, the place of a ‘reverberation’ of images that emerge where intimate space touches an outer immensity.

My painting practice develops the tension between ground and spirit through vernacular iconography—scenes grounded in the familiar yet shot-through with abstract forces—natural, spiritual, imaginary, mythological—that displace and haunt what was settled. I use ground as metaphor and substance: as fabulated spaces that ‘ground’ narrative images and sensations, and ground as earth, using red dirt as pigment or dye, composing a material geography. Exploring how the familiarity of place, home, or body is displaced—made uncanny by external forces, spectral sensations, or fugitive images—I abstract shapes/figures to open latent meanings and visionary geographies in my work.