For me, art-making is the act of creating artifacts of memory and desire— recording and re-presenting things that once existed in the now-irretrievable past. I like to think of my art as a kind of residue. Emotional residue. Mnemonic residue. It’s what’s left over when the moment is gone.

    I am interested in the moment when visual perception kindles thoughts, feelings, and recollections. And because I am equally engaged by the exacting contours of the known world and the boundless flights of imagination, my studio practice is informed by both representational and non-objective art-making traditions. Chance also plays a significant role in the work. My strategies include choosing colors and subjects at random, and using materials and techniques that resist my impulse to control the creative process. This allows for an element of surprise. What emerge are visual documents of landscapes both real and imagined. 

    These landscapes are often informed by the geography of my formative years— the huge snows and endless horizontal lines of the Great Plains; the abrupt, ever-shifting boundaries between earth and sea on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. These places serve as loci for ideas, emotions, and experiences of the West: aspiration, expansion, possibility, opportunity, and freedom— but also emptiness, isolation, loneliness, disorientation, and anomie.

    In my art, I seek to create little wrinkles in time in which the viewer may linger, fully immersed in a moment where notions of past, present, and future fall away. It is my hope that these moments offer a corrective, however fleeting, to our fraught sense of time and mortality.