My most recent, ongoing body of work has been a meditation on similarities between the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 40s and the current moment. My great grandmother serves as the conduit for this meditation, tethering me to history through familial lineage, and offering a new lens through which to view current issues. Born in 1917, Marie Miller and I are separated by 80 years. She was 22 when the second World War broke out in 1939, and 27 when it ended. I'm 27 now, and I desperately wish I could hear her stories. 

Marie died in 2008, when I was 11 years old. At such a young age, I only ever knew her as my great grandma, and never as a whole, complex person. This body of work is centered around a photo of Marie from her home in Jefferson, Iowa. She can be seen in profile, facing right, the wall behind her just catching the shadow of her nose and glasses and creating a double portrait. She is turned ever so slightly away from the camera, her eye precisely obscured by the arm of her glasses, making her feel distant and inaccessible. A dark hallway stretches behind her, contrasting and framing the stark white of her shortly-cropped hair and canary-yellow cardigan, lending her a faint glow. It’s a photo that’s struck me for years, because it has an intense psychological quality that I was never able to ascribe to her during her life.

Including works of charcoal on paper, oil on canvas, and multimedia on panel, this body of work utilizes different modes of making to interrogate different aspects of its subject. The full color spectrum dissolves the image in one painting, only to contrast the monochromatic red hughes of another, and the atmospheric, black-and-white haze of yet another. Some are unmistakably portraits, while in others, the image has been almost entirely obliterated. Each work is a perfect square, compressing the closely-cropped image, simultaneously alluding to and closing off the world beyond its edges. 

This is an ongoing and evolving body of work that has led me to reevaluate my relationships with family, history, and my country.

This project represents a mode of painting that I began developing in 2022 as a response to Sam Gilliam’s final body of work exhibited in the Hirshhorn show Full Circle (2022). These are paintings on panel that utilize wax, beads, glitter, and glass alongside oil paint to create a highly-textured surface that, combined with psychedelic color, disrupts and complicates the image. 

These works cover a range of themes and subjects, but they all share in the effect of obliteration of the image, as sharp lines and clean edges cannot exist here. There’s almost a pointillistic quality to them, with their dots and dobs of paint that rely on optical mixing to form an image, but because the surface is so dynamic and protrudes away from the wall into physical space, the actual effect is more closely related to op art. A sort of veil forms between the image and the surface of the painting, sometimes obscuring information, and other times revealing what lies below.

In 2022, I began making small paintings using nail polish as paint. This project was spurred from my desire to incorporate more glitter in my work, but finding it difficult to integrate materially into oil paintings in a way that satisfied me. Nail polish offered a solution to this problem, as glitter is often already mixed in, and feels entirely natural in this medium. In exploring the possibilities of nail polish, I found the lacquered, enamel surfaces of these works lent them a jewel-like quality that allows them to oscillate between image and art object. Coupled with the clear cultural connotations attached to beauty products, nail polish seemed to me the perfect material to depict and examine queer life, love, and intimacy.

Shortly after beginning this project, I was made aware of the late artist Jerome Caja, who undertook a very similar project during the AIDS epidemic in the early 90s. Often painting on discarded pieces of trash, Caja used nail polish to illustrate the queer underbelly of a world he inhabited. Caja’s works are unapologetic in their crassness as they confront the viewer with a culture left behind by the mainstream, and who isn’t bound by the constraints of a conservative moral sensibility. 

My own nail polish paintings adhere more to a traditional painting approach, though Caja’s oeuvre has certainly shaped my understanding of queer art as necessitating a subversion of the norm. Queerness exists largely in the margins of heteronormative society, and is now more threatened than it has been in decades. This body of work is a reminder of our existence, our beauty, our humanity, and our resilience. 

These works were inspired by the spotted lanternfly invasion, and the implications of the concept of "invasive species." I'm interested in everything from the aesthetics of the bug, with its bright red underbelly and polkadots, to the way that it hops and flutters through the air, and how squishing them can feel like a game of chase. I think invasive species often share a complicated relationship with guilt and responsibility, because of course the invasive species is simply existing where it happens to be, but in doing so causes real ecological damage.