My work is about the combination of text and gesture, and text as gesture. My practice revolves around text and how text works—how it looks, how it reads, how it expresses itself (and how I use it to express myself). I aim to make layered, complicated abstract textual landscapes that investigate the chaos and confusion of communication and the complicated, conflicting messaging we receive from advertisements and media. I mine the content of old and new magazines, signage, and spoken language. I am always chasing the landscape of the page and trying to find a new way back to it—in some cases purely through the color yellow, which to me is legal pad, sticky note, aged newspaper. I am always thinking about translating the visual languages and aesthetics of graphic design into painterly gestures. 

I grew up next to the Hollywood sign and the Sunset Strip, and I was impacted by the text within the LA landscape. I basically learned to read in the back of my parents’ cars reading signage out loud, and a lot of my sewn collage pieces incorporate repurposed billboard vinyl from Los Angeles. My work pays attention (and homage) to graphic communication and constructions of letters, while embracing “mess”—chance, free-form gesture, hand-made text, and typographic expression. Though much of the meaning in my paintings remains ambiguous and open to interpretation, I see my works as documents, records, or journal entries.