I am using installation in painting to develop narratives and abstract storylines about the tangibility and or misinterpretation of presence, that speak to the temporality of people and place. Through a commercialized vocabulary of color and pattern, I create overly decorated interior and exterior spaces that seem like a fraud or mask for reality, hiding behind a “sugar-coated” veil of false presentation. In a harmony of contradictions, they’re playfully pitiful. Clumsily cauterized wounds that hide under muffled chuckles and seeping bandages. They teeter between acceptance and denial. How can the absence of something or someone fester into a ubiquitous presence so loud it makes your ears ring? Taking kitsch by the horns, the work addresses childhood, family dynamics, and the distorted sense of home and time. The paintings obtain a certain object-hood, both in the physicality of the paint and through installation, that becomes like a posed reality or “living still- life". Enticing and tantalizing, they offer an interaction with the viewer, seeking a concrete presence to challenge their own. Attention whores. Self-centered even... yet simultaneously self loathing. Toying with the past, present, and future, they feel still, like something just happened or is about to. They confront the unsettling fragmentation of time and place, the lonely, the waiting, and the forgotten.