I make paintings of the figure as a way to understand desire, which functions in my work in part as a fantasy about being both subject and maker. Throughout my childhood, I was a frequent subject of my father’s paintings and photographs, resulting in my being potently aware, from a very young age, of being looked at and depicted.

Over the last seven years, my work has been informed by my experiences in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is a practice of speaking freely without preconception, and is in many ways similar to painting, where I imagine, take apart, and reconstruct images based on sources ranging from film stills to personal memories. Psychoanalytic discourse and painting both allow for impulses, slips, and interventions of the unconscious to emerge and interrupt the picture or story being conveyed. The resulting surface is made of scars and inventions brought about by rupture, deconstruction, and remaking.