Artist Statement

I am a habitual collector of lost and abandoned things. The of discarded artifacts recent past are gemlike, treasures buried among garage sales and garbage bags.

As a child I constantly picked dirt-caked treasures out of the gutters, convinced that I could uncover their past lives and restore their magical powers. The original trophies of my suburban archaeology are gone. But that same desire to dig through the mundane debris, to give voice to the silent scraps, drove me to amass my treasure-trove of abandoned snapshots.

The paint is a vehicle to search for the most minute hints, for their absent memories, for all of the embedded potential of half-told stories. I intentionally create structures that intertwine, eclipsing one-another and flaunting their impenetrability. Each canvas depicts a mythologized figment of the ordinary, based entirely on the limited testimonies of the collected photographs.As a body of work, these paintingsrefer to both the tantalizing promise that emanates from lost treasures and the maddening reality that no matter what details survive from the past, they can only ever show us the ghosts of the glories and tragedies which preceded our own.