Artist Statement
My dream-like worlds and the unexpected characters who inhabit them are an exploration of the Freudian concept of “the uncanny,” which describes an encounter with that which is simultaneously strange and familiar. The uncanny often manifests in dreams, through their bizarre churning and resurfacing of otherwise forgotten experiences. Even a vivid, realistic dream -- like a painting -- inevitably distorts and reinvents our reality.
Through abstractions, warped reflections, and reconstructions of what I actually observe in our world, I seek to compare and connect painting with the "unrestrained, exaggerated, monstrous” quality of dreaming that Sigmund Freud describes. My paintings blur the distinctions between figure and ground, between observed and imagined, and between physical objects and their reflected images, resulting in surreal landscapes that integrate the strange and fantastic with our familiar reality. Glass is a recurring motif in my dreamscapes as it symbolizes the deceptive lucidity of dreams. Fragile like our minds, glass also has its way of blurring, distorting, fragmenting, revealing, and concealing.
