These fragments—domestic kitsch, obsolete product photography, flickers of desire from another decade—are rearranged, collaged, painted. Sometimes I change them a lot, sometimes barely at all. It’s a way of thinking through what we see, of tracing the outlines of an era in the things it forgets. Comfort food, physical money, hygiene rituals, beauty templates—tiny systems that structure the big picture. These aren’t grand narratives; they’re loose chains of thought. Not so much answers as echoes.
Painting slows everything down. It gives space to linger on something stupidly familiar, something usually overlooked. I’m not interested in illustrating arguments or telling stories. I’m interested in what happens when an image opens up—when it becomes a conversation, a moment of shared recognition. The painting is not the message; it’s the moment before the message, or after it, or beside it.
I also think a lot about quotation.
My paintings quote other images the way songs and sounds can be sampled into a track —ads, movie stills, vintage ephemera, 3D renders that reek of contemporary digital gloss. Some elements feel old, some unmistakably now. Time becomes slippery. You look at one thing and it sends you somewhere else—into a parallel decade, a different mood. That temporality lives in the brushwork too, in the way figuration slides into abstraction, in the weird democracy of motifs on the canvas.
Even the exhibition space becomes part of the conversation. I like when you have to move—stoop, stretch, peek around a corner. I like when the room talks back. The work isn’t just hung; it’s embedded. It quotes the architecture, mimics its gestures, points to what’s already there. The paintings aren’t windows. They’re things. They’re here with us, in physical space. Real, strange, and speaking.