I am interested in the way people create narratives in order to understand history, technology, data, and the increasingly complex world around us. As this complexity is boiled down to a set of narratives, they sometimes become so simplified “that they bear little relationship to the reality outside,” as Adam Curtis puts it.

In Curtis’ documentary series Can’t Get You Out of My Head, he focuses on the individual and individualism. As individualism has grown more prominent, political leaders are struggling to tell us stories of where we are going as a nation because they have lost their ability to collectively unite us. And when they do, their narratives bear little resemblance to reality and instead of uniting us, people often feel more lost.

As technology allows us to render scenes from these fictional narratives in ever more believable ways, it can be contrasted with figurative painting—a medium that immediately foregrounds the fact that it isn’t factual but instead a fictional interpretation of reality. This is the starting point for the kind of paintings I’d like to make. Instead of painting being redundant, does its built-in subjectivity make it more potent? How does one make a painting about this moment in time?

Painting is interesting because it takes a world where we are slipping into the metaverse and says to the viewer, without hesitation: "this is a lie."