My work investigates the irony of the American lifestyle, and evolves from my experience of living in the suburban Midwest.  With a focus on color and pattern, my detailed representational paintings and collages draw attention to banal landscapes, structures, objects, and situations that are often so familiar they become invisible.  Making the invisible visible by finding beauty, strangeness, unfamiliarity, or irony in the ordinary and familiar is the motivation for my work.

My paintings often contradict the size of their subject.  Their scale fosters an intimate and captivating relationship with both maker and viewer.  They often exist in series as well, as I am drawn to patterns created by repetition.

My works on paper are collages of images and text from vintage books and found materials.  The situations that I create humorously express my cynical outlook on American society, often focusing on the loss of childhood innocence and corruption of the American public.  The vintage images take the viewer back to another time, but the images themselves move past nostalgia into a conversation about the tarnished state of contemporary society.

In the artmaking process I aim to provoke certain questions: How does one define "ordinary"?  How can the familiar be made unfamiliar?  Does landscape dictate social structure or does social structure dictate landscape?  With subtle criticality, cynicism, and humor, my work explores the relationships of text to image; landscape to person; land to structure; past to present; familiar to unfamiliar; and innocence to corruption.

In collaboration with Chicago interior designer Crystal Blackshaw, my paintings and collages are on display and for sale at Chicago's newest custom antique furniture refinishing boutique, Chic Antique.  Stop in to the Lakeview neighborhood store to check out the murals I painted on the walls too!


Chic Antique
3435 N. Broadway
Chicago, IL 60657
Hours: Thursday - Saturday 11am - 7pm, or by appointment