A screen is off. It is a mirror. It doesn’t last long. The blue glow returns to your face - one more thing to look up, another thing to check, plenty of time to watch - it’s just a short video. Once we wrote in journals, diaries, letters but now our thoughts and desires are mapped in browser histories, in comments and reviews and the constant reminder that it’s our choice – it’s all our choice please enjoy your freedom of customization and don’t forget to rate us! The craving for input and stimulation found in screens is a loop of data – a footprint of you that is stomped into the stream of information that flows all around like light, air, and water.
 
What would happen if the screens that we cling to so tightly become a true mirror of ourselves? They occupy our brains and time and imagination, but we are more than the sum of our devices. As humans, we are biology and physical needs and electrical impulses in a complex and messy system that dwarfs the data crunching processes going on behind the screen. What if those screens adapted to be like us and cracked open with all the new information coursing through them? Flesh is loss of control; a disruption of the clean code that guides it. Virtual has cracked through to the physical, the glossy flat surface that will be contained no longer.
 
Technological devices profoundly change our most private experiences. In this body of work, visceral colors and textures punctuate sleek blue surfaces reminiscent of glowing screens. Fleshy and painterly explosions disrupt calm glossy surfaces. Paint is a metaphor for that which is messy, physical and real in an increasingly screen-obsessed world.

 From life-sized iPhone 4 replicas made with foam core, balsa wood, blue acetate and acrylic paint to acrylic and oil paintings on advent calendars to a church made of paper, these pieces blur the lines between spiritual and virtual iconography.

These paintings show a partial view of intimate images of motherhood--as seen through a mask based on an iPhone's screen.

Fire and Ice was an installation at GRACE (Greater Reston Arts Center) in the summer of 2011. It is based on the eponymous poem by Robert Frost. In it, paintings of media images surround the viewer to show the great political divide in this country and how that division affects us all regardless of which side we find ourselves on.

Through sources such as CNN breaking news, I get constant reminders that people are dying in wars and natural disasters alongside celebrity gossip. Britney Spearâ??s latest breakdown gets equal weight as tsunami that killed over 170,000 people. My paintings based on illuminated manuscripts seek to explore and reflect this conundrum by putting Internet-based headlines and news stories within a more intimate context.

The pop-up ads are actual-sized drawings of both real and fake pop-up ads.

A Baroque painting on a cathedral ceiling and a pornographic image in a slick magazine both transport the viewer to a desired state of ecstasy, whether spiritual or sexual. The church ceiling series is paintings based on reproductions of painted cathedral ceilings. I reproduce the faux architecture and replace the figures with couples lifted from porn magazines, figures from popular culture, and personal narrative.

The most recent painting, Something is Missing, was specifically created as a response to the Goucher Collegeâ??s Rosenberg Gallery space. The galleryâ??s permanent lights were incorporated in the helicopter searchlights. Though quite different from the earlier ceiling pieces, this piece continues the idea of human beingsâ?? innate drive to search for something more in life.