My oil paintings, glass works, and mixed media are abstract meditations on familial relationships and their boundaries. The interaction between colors and layers of pigment reference human interaction. I apply veils of colors, which obscure, alter, or blend into previous layers of color. These layers metaphorically reference how family relationships affect the person we are and influence who we become. I approach my oil paintings serially and often refer to them as sisters or a family. I often work on two or more canvases at a time allowing each painting to share palettes and a similar language of shapes. When I work this way, it allows me to explore different responses to an experience. The interaction of the paint embodies struggle, and new shapes and shades of color emerge as the boundaries of painted areas are dissolved or declared. I also layer color and pigment in my glass paintings. Here, I place finely ground colored glass onto clear glass sheets, then fire it, rework it, and fire it again. Reworking the glass allows me to build a history of layers, which I relate to the way that a person carries around a history of experiences. Lastly, in my prints, I use multiple stencils to apply layers of ink to conceal or reveal the history of the work and reference the ever-changing nature of relationships. This dance of emergence and disappearance of color relates to the forced kinship of family and calls to mind the levels in relationships we build with people, consciously or not.

Sweaty Mother Slow Groove is an engagement in magical thinking that proposes a displacement of swamp methodologies into the virtual realm, existing during the fourth wave. In doing so the cyborg and goddess are united in a re-routing of essentialism and the neo-liberal domination of technology. The metaphorical swamp is the possibility of a mushy danger zone that harnesses the absorption of an unwanted space: a disintegration of the binary and the soft-coded awareness of the body as a process, not a site.

Prior to January 2010, my work in painting focused on opposites, such as the difference between the instinctual and the planned. Formally I was interested in the need to veil, and the urge to reveal the thinking and processes in the creation of a painting. Through the juxtaposition of these things I sought to strip landscape of its inherent divinity and create a new kind oflandscape using color, atmosphere, and mark making. My goal was to make the monumental insignificant and secondary to my process and create works with clear intent, a physical process, and an interest in how color can be used to suggest the illusions of space, time, and depth. Currently, my work has undergone major changes in regards to content. This thesis will explain the journey I have undertaken during the past two and a half years while discussing my reasons for abandoning my initial proposal for something based less in academic discourse and more in personal introspection.

My artwork represents my admiration and criticisms of car culture I have gathered throughout my personal experiences beginning at a very early age. The work exists in the form of drawings, paintings, prints, collage and sculpture. This work is created through the elements of personal narrative, desires, obsessions, and questions surrounding car culture and its influences. My intention to refurbish the icons of this culture has involved creating work that is both obsessive and critical for personal exploration and understanding of past memories.