My paintings explore ecological crisis in the banal experiences of everyday life. Whereas the violent rearrangement of large-scale natural disasters often occurs away from centers of the industrialized world, I am interested in exposing their reverberations elsewhere. Safety becomes an illusion, separation from catastrophe an ontological fallacy. Awareness of the interconnectedness of our global political economy unleashes fear and melancholy. Rich colors swirl and moments of representational clarity become wrapped into non-representational mesh. Yet, as horrifying as life may be in the “Anthropocene,” I am driven to expose its beauty, to make a space for aesthetic experience even as we plummet to our end.
For "Contaminant," I was thinking about the way a simple, possibly accidental drop of paint can transform the entire composition of a glass of fresh water. This event is visually breathtaking while simultaneously frightening when the glass of water implies the local water supply, and the paint becomes industrial runoff. I wanted both, the process and aesthetic in the piece, to take on this transformation and let one visual language contaminate the other as it moves from a mechanical and photographic mark into painterly brushstrokes, mimicking the generic alteration of the now ubiquitous atrazine.
