I engage with dysfunctional spaces in society and use the language of abstraction to process my experience. This has been fueled in the last decade by my status as a resident of Inglewood, who traverses a variety of communities in my daily travels. People who have limited access to education, economic stability and safety populate many of the urban areas that I have encountered around LA. There is an excess of graffiti, discarded furniture and other trash, untended parkways and sidewalks, stray dogs and cats. Also to be found are unexpected patches of wildflowers, lovely bungalows, vegan restaurants, kids playing, trees and birds. We occupy a world of contradictions, where blight and gentrification butt against each other with distressing regularity and discomfort.

My work explores these rough locales that we visit and/or occupy and attempts to reconcile a reality that is both intolerable and customary. I examine geography, cultural history, psychological trauma, and social anger by wedding aspects of the formal language of painting with tropes from visited environments and decorative motifs. The resulting paintings emit a beautiful distress.

Deeply disturbed by the political, cultural and economic conditions that have developed in the US in the past few years, I made the decision to leave and relocate to Portugal, which I did in Summer 2021. In my new home, I anticipate a recalibration of my artist's eye to a variety of new scapes and experiences.