My painting practice has been informed by the cinematic 'body' as
emotional and physical affect: evoking an extended and interiorized gaze in an image and disturbing the boundaries between subject and viewer. This idea of an interiorized gaze, often found within narratives of heightened physical and emotional states, can destabilize habits of visual organization and extend meaning beyond an immediate context. Painting's suggestive, physical, and spatial qualities can speak to these heightened states and re-imagine the bodily spaces of close vision they promise to generate.

My undergraduate work focused on the body and the face as pictorial spaces of seductions and resistances. Using found images, I sought out demarcations and textures rather than narrative potential, extending them as visual phenomena by means of paint. This interest was extended in a series of paintings completed during a residency at the Banff Centre. The resulting paintings were based on digital stills of an actor's face taken in sequence from a TV screen. While being selective of the formal information in the stills, I developed a painting process that involved both image and paint phenomena. Carving out drawings of the face-subject with rag and solvent in a beginning application of dark color, I began to integrate 'early' marks and their insistence into the construction of the face. These marks would begin to read as scratches, blemishes, and surfaces of fatigue attached to the temporal and personal aspects of the painting's creation. This process moved into a focus upon the extended act of looking, reiterating, and interrupting a sense of finality through painting.

Throughout my undergraduate to most recent work is a continued
interest in painting not as illustration but as an event, wherein the
process of painting describes the body's constant search for access into an image. While the pictorial contains the nature of its
image-body, the faces in these paintings are also under the influence of painting's territorial nature of lines. These faces become immersed in the rituals of constant states of change, their faciality suspended without becoming inert. Rather than only translating or performing, painting can imagine the possibilities of images.