The figures in my work are drawn from a collective memory, rooted in a mediated version of American history and iconography. Overlapping symbols, identities, and stories try to cohere but cannot hold. These subjects function as naive and absurd placeholders from an inherited past. I am interested in how these figures can lose their weight, and in doing so are released from history. The historical visual language of painting is utilized in contradictory ways. Figures and spaces are rendered, abstracted, and rendered again: structure versus gesture, form versus flatness, illusion versus materiality. This cycle continues until I’m satisfied that I’ve done both, and neither.