Conveying a deeply personal and idiosyncratic vision within my work is crucial to my artistic process. Therefore, I visually ‘sample’ my work alongside art historical work. This act of self-cannibalization makes for an ongoing dialogue from painting to painting. Each painting is an inextricable link in a long line of storytelling and character development. The painting process brings the entire composition to life, giving it a kind of warmth that is impossible to create digitally. When the painting begins to sing, I know that I am close to letting it go into the world.

The Internet has flattened art historical hierarchies. One can simply do a Google search and find a Dutch Renaissance painting, a Modernist sculpture, or even a clip-art rendering of an emoji. I want to reflect this flattening, immediacy, and ease of image retrieval in my work.

We are inundated with imagery daily through our screens. I have been working to harness this deluge of visual information and synthesize it within a painting. I think my maximalist paintings are both influenced by, and reflect, an experience of social media.

While there have been some crucial and incredibly important female artists in the canon of Western art history, women have largely been the subjects and rarely the makers. I am drawn to art history so I can re-present it. I would like to tell a different story, one from a female point of view. The woman on display is proud while vulnerable, imperfect yet real. She intimidates rather than seduces. I want these figures to be empowered and autonomous.

Charli XCX is an inspiring woman, sharing her emotions bravely through her wonderfully inventive music. She raises other women up and I would love to be a part of that.

For museum exhibitions, I will often make diagrams of the work on view. These depict the art historical source material I utilize. I want my work to be specific while open to interpretation. I embrace any and all interpretations of the paintings.

That there is beauty in sharing vulnerability.

I spent the summer of 2017 at the Rubell Family Collection as an artist-in-residence. During this time, I used an exhibition space as a studio. The space was quite large, and I approached that as a challenge. I made the largest work I had ever made, using a scissor lift to manoeuvre around the canvases. This truly was the time for me to make my figures as striking and commanding as possible.

I curated Vortex, a thirteen-person show, at Kravets Wehby Gallery this past fall (it is currently on view until mid-November). The ongoing collective survival of our human spirit and our steady emergence as a solid yet weathered community throughout this past year inspired the development of Vortex. We have been uprooted and dislocated but remain resilient. Our differences are our strengths and bind us together.
Each of these thirteen artists, using the body as subject, presents their experience of living in the United States in 2020. As individual works of art, and as a united whole, Vortex encapsulates the urgent necessity to stay connected and to speak, shout, and maintain the truth. I am currently working on a dinnerware collection and have a show planned in Brussels for 2021!