My recent work engages my background as both an Italian-American and native Brooklynite. This engagement via the lens of painting examines the tropes, both linguistic and visual, of these identities. Reflecting on the qualities of the acrylic medium, I aim to explore the plasticity of these phenomena. As shifts in language occur during displacement or rubbing up against new cultural entities, so do the possibilities within abstraction of the preceding visual cultures. Drawing from disparate art-historical traditions in tandem with pop-culture references, I set out to play with, undermine, and confound Italian-American culture, toying with the existing linguistic and visual repertoire of vernacular references that all too often have gone underappreciated and unexamined in painting.