Life and death are messy and imperfect, and my work includes these conditions in its making. My creative process includes a degree of precision, balanced by an embrace of paint's liquidity and the natural resistance inherent in all materials. I am interested in representation without illusion, which I pursue through an exploration of the relationship between mimesis and abstraction. The resulting images speak about their own language and making, even as they respond to the world of experience.
The work presented in Memory Machine and Recitation results from a year-long meditation on my mother's death in 2009. Over the past year, I have approached my studio practice as a personal variation on the Jewish tradition of saying Kaddish, a daily memorial prayer one recites for eleven months after the death of a parent. In making this work, I have arrived at my own understanding of the Afterlife: it is not where we find ourselves when we die, it is the life we live after the death of someone we love.