Fluorescence is infamous for its ability to draw attention, but less obviously, it can also mask reality. Bright neons provide a distraction from immediately understanding what lies below the surface. Though captivating at first glance, fluorescence merely conjures chaos and mystery. As a rule, all of the imagery in my work is pulled from personal photographs. However, I insist on creating a level of removal from the world they were captured from. The natural, unstoppable passage of time has severed them from their original context. After they are altered, layered, and painted, they no longer belong to me and live only in abstracted memory.

There is a tactility to paint that cannot be achieved by the digital reproduction of a space. However, I don't view myself as a painter. I use paint like a designer as I transpose and layer found imagery. My pieces are maps at their barest definition, but the combination of opaque and clear, fluorescent and dull creates a more dimensional space than the traditional map one might find stuffed in a glovebox. They are both landscapes and diagrams, paintings and architectural models that explore aesthetics rather than realistic construction. The scale and appearance of these forms vary, but color and process are the common threads uniting my current body of work.

My imagery lands in a space that is neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It is the middle ground, a liminal place that explores the mythology threaded through even the most mundane planes of existence. In this space, I focus on layering, indexing, and repetition, which are themes I’ve found in my images of suburbia. We are both haunted and fascinated by the suburbs in popular culture. Identical houses all in rows invoke feelings reminiscent of motion sickness in a hot car with cicadas buzzing in the distance. My work is a way for me to navigate this feeling, to traverse the complex understanding of how we experience the uncanny. Dissonance comes into play with the image of power lines cutting through the safety of a neatly ordered street, or the way a brief glimpse through the window of a house at night reveals the mystery and complexity of varied lives hidden within the sameness of a suburban street. There is a kind of violence in reflecting on what came before where a doorway now stands. Much like a once-great city, all structures are a collage over the rubble of what once was. In observing this phenomenon of the familiar, I have built a new world.