→ My work questions the referential nature of image, exploring the relationship between its mental and physical aspects, often through the sculptural synthesis of image and material. Particularly, I am interested in the relationship of imagery to our experience of its artifice in daily life, and tap popular culture and art history for moments where this intersection attenuates our categories of belief, which I explore with painting, drawing, digital image capture, and sculpture.

→ Painting to me is a framework for expression within a language encompassing objects, actions, and ideas. If we can broadly label this language as sculpture, painting is a syntax that explores the specific questions that arise from synthesizing an image with material; that is, connecting a mental object to a physical construct. Where, for example, is the realm of the Real - is it in its depiction, in its memory, or in its sensation? What is the difference between the thing we see before us and the image we see in our heads?

→ The burden of these questions, articulated predominantly during painting's Modernist history, but reaching back through the pre-modern/pre-photographic era, distinguish it as more than a medium of pigment, binder, vehicle, and surface, but a fairly specific line of inquiry that lends itself to photography, film, and digital media as well. Painting is the locus where these seemingly contradictory notions of truth have been and can be addressed simultaneously: which is the true referent - the object or the image? Even Leonardo said that painting was a mental thing – una cosa mentale.

Reality is softer than we imagine. Or maybe it is as soft as we can imagine. But it is definitely soft.