The paintings in this most recent body of work act as understated catalysts for contemplation around collective desires for meaning and transcendence. Through amalgamated scraps of marginal detritus and fleeting moments, they allude to and circumvent self-important art historical lineages while inviting the possibility of universal themes from any small place or time of individual experience.

These trompe l'oeil compositions create the effect of cut and arranged scraps of paper, impasto textures, stencil cutouts, small pops of glitter and various colors of tape. The foregrounded shapes often float in front of fields of soft focus airbrushed imagery or soberly playful abstraction. The shapes are both static in the physicality of their rendering and improvisationally energized. The surfaces and layers of acrylic medium are meticulously crafted to obscure most traces of the hand and tool marks. In person, the works have a feeling of plastic near-perfection that echo the varied surfaces of contemporary mass production while remaining resolutely within contemporary languages of painting.

There is something slapdash, transient, fleeting, and unknowable in the initial quick decisions made by tearing, cutting with scissors that create a deckled edge, or utilizing mass produced stencils used by hobbyists for craft projects. The images depicted are particular in tone and atmosphere, but are also mundane and somewhat ubiquitous: skies photographed through a car window, cropped images of the moon, a vinyl shower curtain printed with phases of the moon, or desaturated images of flowers from a self-help book on grief. With relatively limited juxtapositions, these works evoke larger spaces of contemplation around subjects of perception, permanence, abstraction, mediation, longing, beauty, taste, regionalism, locale, loss, nostalgia, banality, mutable landscapes, the legacy of avant garde and other aesthetic histories, personal narratives, and universal experiences.

Moons, hearts, stars, raindrops, paint chips, clouds, dots, snowflakes and arbitrary geometry thoughtfully litter the surfaces like corrupted happenstance constructivism or melancholic pop art. Throwaway symbols of whimsy and magical thinking sit in forever unresolved formal and symbolic relationships. They offer potential spiritualist associations and modernist metaphysical propositions without insisting on absolutist utopian ideals. Illusion and materialism are held in harmonious contradiction where the work is continually operating both as planes of applied color and satisfying visual trickery.

In several works such as With Purpose or Of a Special Sort, the compositions are centrally anchored by renderings of awkwardly imagined variations on standardized concrete block forms. Subtle personifications and individual traits would inhibit these blocks from any typical uses in construction, but allow for a possible empathy around celebrating the differences that make them ill-suited for a collective project. I like thinking of them as “artistic blocks,” and imagine that they embody some kind of metaphor about the particularities that distinguish all of us from our cookie-cutter classifications or group identities.

The work may all have an aspect of finding visual languages that resist fixed meanings, but can be continually temporary, imperfect, and adaptable to many of the complex circumstances of life that begins where the edges of the canvases end.