Artist Statement
Before they became paintings, the pieces of fabric I paint on had lives of their own. They were tablecloths, curtains, slipcovers, and other domestic ephemera. I leave their floral, polka-dotted, and paisley surfaces partially revealed as ...

Artist Statement
Before they became paintings, the pieces of fabric I paint on had lives of their own. They were tablecloths, curtains, slipcovers, and other domestic ephemera. I leave their floral, polka-dotted, and paisley surfaces partially revealed as people's clothing or objects, using painted shadows and reflections to merge them physically, visually, and metaphorically with their environments.

I mine mid-century advertisements, cookbooks, and homemaking guides for images of people, food, and appliances, refashioning them into oblique narratives whose characters are cropped off the edges of the canvases, frozen in moments of interaction with the shiny, textured surfaces that surround them. I see the sensuality and beauty in these surfaces - a marbled vinyl floor or a translucent, wriggling jello salad - and painstakingly build up layers of oil paint in an attempt to render them in all their mid-century glory. By focusing on the seductiveness of manufactured objects, I explore how the lingering desire for the American Dream, in all its suburban nuclear excess, is in essence a sexual one. I twist the perpetually nostalgic visual language of advertising to bring to the surface the underlying uneasiness of this idealized dream world.

In constructions inspired by magazine advertisements of the 1950's, I often attach squares of painted patterns to the images, which contradict, reinforce, or parody their ambiguous narratives. The relationship between the surfaces of the fabrics and the stories I paint on top of them shifts continually between flatness and the illusion of depth. The patterned surfaces underlying the images bind the figures inextricably to their surroundings, the physical objects of their times and places. Whether they are liberating themselves from the strictures of the patterns they are made of, or binding themselves more tightly to them, I leave to the viewer.