Many of my paintings begin with a small diorama that I construct out of paper, cardboard, playdough, and sometimes a shoebox.  Into this miniature set I introduce the actors: I photograph family and friends, print the photos onto cardstock, and trim them into paper-dolls.  Each paper figure is positioned in the diorama just as a director carefully blocks actors onstage.  Next I light my set with flashlights and photograph it.  The painting emerges from these photos of my miniature stage and its stiff paper players.   This process uses the language of childhood – dioramas, paper-dolls – in service of adult preoccupations.  My paintings externalize the emotional undercurrents of familial and social interactions as if they were tableaux from a children’s theatrical production.

Each tableau features the recurring character of the Inappropriate Body.  This character takes on different faces and genders but remains, in essence, the same.  The Inappropriate Body incarnates the body’s capacity to betray and humiliate its owner.  It presents the body dissected, clumsily reassembled, abject, inadequate, yet sometimes defiantly, violently cheerful.

Sometimes the Inappropriate Body dons a wig or garment.    These costumes offer a taste of a new identity and the emotional protection that comes with having the appropriate clothing for a given situation.  The costumes are flat, fake, and stiff.  Many of the wigs are helmet-like, a literalization of the phrase “helmet hair.”  I am interested in the concept of fashion and personal grooming as a form of self-protection, a talisman against rejection.  But these costumes are often too small or the wrong shape.  Like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her toes to fit into the tiny glass slipper, the figure dons the ill-fitting garment only to lose the portions of body that do not fit.  Borrowing John Updike’s words, these costumes are like “a mask that eats into the face.” 

The color palette pursues an atmosphere of enveloping cheerfulness and nausea.  The colors are pulled from the sweet hues of taffy, reminiscent of childhood.  But the colors are intensified to suggest taffy’s stickiness and the queasiness of too much candy on an empty stomach.  Against the cheerful violence of the Inappropriate Body pulsates the sticky sweetness of the color palette, spinning a candy-colored fever dream in which the characters pose and writhe.