My work is a reaction against kitsch, contrasting the day to day reality of lived experience with cultural and personal fantasy.

To sentimentalize (as well as eroticize, commoditize, and romanticize) is to deny unpleasant realities and to exclude conflicting perceptions, so that the constructed veneer adjusts the picture of our histories to reflect a constant string of good times unmarred by boredom, anger, unhappiness, ugliness, or anxiety.  Ultimately, photos and other cultural ephemera are no longer a record of our histories and events, but a new creation occupying the space of truth. Like retouching a photograph in Photoshop, it creates an incomplete - and dishonest - record of reality.  What is true is that a composite record of reality must include the cracks in the façade - the contact sheet rejects, but the tendency in American media culture is to project an inoffensive common denominator to the exclusion of all other representation. We must reject the impulse to disregard that which we find disturbing; what is truly disturbing is the denial of ugliness - the creation of that which excludes all that is inherently unsettling, leaving those who find no reflection of their own experiences in pop culture feeling unworthy of representation, both physically and psychically. 

        The images I create are informed by popular imagery, historical fantasy, cultural trends, tabloid news, and gossip magazines. Continually breaking apart and reassembling cultural output, I am concerned that people engage as participant in – and not just receptacle for - the creation of American cultural identity.