My work deals with the connection between human and nonhuman nature through an examination of memory, myth, and both personal and imagined histories. I am drawn to the spaces (and non-spaces) we create for ourselves, and the stories about them that we tell and inhabit. The particular space in which I currently live is defined by a specific set of cultural myths: cowboys and wagon trains, prophets and pioneers. My own history has been written by these stories. My Mormon ancestors settled these lands, following Manifest Destiny and the religious impulse to flee to the desert. As a painter dealing with themes of landscape, I am implicated in the failure of these same histories about the American West as much as I am as an inheritor of pioneer myth. In the wilderness I am torn between the desire to lose myself in the romantic sublime and a simultaneous desire to bear witness to the systems that order it even while they hold invisible the underlying violent history which claimed and made it what it is.