SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

Every painting becomes its own world, with its own logic and its own rules. As I work, it continuously assembles, disassembles, and reassembles until the finished work holds a tension between coming together and drifting apart. I’m not painting the world as it is, but the messy process of what it could become.

I work improvisationally, so there’s a lot of uncertainty baked into the making of these paintings. That feeling doesn’t disappear when the work is done. It’s part of the experience I hope to share with the viewer. Each painting invites us to spend some time with it before rushing to name or solve it. There’s no map telling us how to navigate these worlds. Instead, the work asks us to find our own bearings, our own orientation. Uncertainty, then, begins to feel less like an obstacle and more like a playful space to dwell, a resource filled with possibility.

Humor has become more important to me in my work. I don’t mean humor as a joke or a form of deflection or ridicule, but as a way of appreciating awkwardness and peculiarity, of inhabiting a different perspective. The gawky shapes, the odd relationships, the goofy titles all point toward a way of being present with things that don’t seem to quite fit or resolve as expected. Humor helps us loosen our grip on how we think the world is supposed to be. In doing so, it allows us to see things a little differently and maybe even see ourselves a little more clearly.