— Has art always been a part of your life? How did you first come to painting?

I was encouraged to draw and make things from a young age. I don’t recall ever wanting to be an artist as a kid, but I do remember a strong compulsion to create.

I studied photography at the Corcoran before moving to New York. I felt a huge loss after losing access to the color darkroom and began painting to fill that void.

— For your paintings you draw inspiration from found photographs and even your own family’s photo albums, and that sense of vintage Americana really comes through in this series with its cowboys, cars, and Cookie Monster cups. What is it about these images that inspires you? And how do you see yourself complicating them? Because there is also a certain surreal quality to your works, in which faces and scenes are blurred, pixelated, and split.

I’m fascinated by Americana, and how nostalgia affects memory. I see the snapshots I work with as a personal encyclopedia of Americana.

The interventions in my paintings are based on the duality of myth and truth in memory. Most recently, this has manifested itself as pixels. The ways in which we document and store our memories has become intangible, viewed on screens and stored on remote servers. The pixels in my work serve as a metaphor for that loss of tactile documentation. Rather than being the building blocks of an image, I am using pixels as a form of concealment.

— I had the pleasure of seeing your work in person during A Cherished Haunting at New Collectors Gallery in 2024, and I was completely captivated—your method of painting with oil on the back of tempered glass, so that the final image is viewed through a scrim, is something I’ve never seen before. What the internet can’t sufficiently communicate about these works is the experience of moving around them to view the verso, from after-image to its source, inviting the viewer into a continual negotiation of perspective and memory. Can you speak to your experience of working in this medium?

I paint in reverse, on the backside of the glass, beginning with the smallest details and progressing backward into larger and broader sections, a bit like an underpainting. My marks are reliant on muscle and visual memory—I cannot see what the painting looks like until I reveal the other side to myself. There is a sort of blindness, which mimics the way I printed in the darkroom. Color darkrooms require total darkness. There is no amber lamp, and it requires memorization to work—where you place the enlarger’s timer, negative carrier…

The choice to paint on glass is also tied to photography. Some early photographic images, such as ambrotypes, were made on glass. Once prints were made on paper, we began framing and placing them behind glass. And today, we consume most of our images through the glass screens of smartphones and tablets. With the ongoing conversation on photography and painting, I felt it was necessary to address that connection through the painting support I chose.

— Do you find inspiration in literature or other art forms? Whose work do you return to most?

I’m always listening to music in the studio. I’ve had Paddy McAloon’s “I Trawl the Megahertz” on repeat since hearing it for the first time a few months ago. It has a cinematic quality to it and touches on memory and the passing of time. Annie Ernaux’s memoir Les années (The Years), which uses photographs to illustrate changes in French society, has been enriching, as well.

I often look at the work of Rebecca Salsbury James, Inge Morath, William Eggleston, Dike Blair, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Bechtle, to name a few…

— What’s next for you? You’re currently completing a residency—are there other projects or lines of inquiry on the horizon?

I just got back from a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center a few weeks ago. I have a billboard going up as part of the Billboard Creative’s LA exhibition this month, on the corner of North Wilcox Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. This summer, I’ll be in the studio starting a new body of work to show next year.