Statement

I grew up in suburban New Jersey, my parents recent refugees from Shanghai and Vienna. Recently I became a dual citizen, receiving an Austrian passport. I connect to my art as a way of making sense of my personal environment within an art historical perspective, with thoughts of place/landscape/environment as a central theme. My practice is divided between New York City and the Hudson Valley.


My project-based work is focused on landscape in the broadest sense, approaching place in a variety of conceptions and mediums. How we interact with history, time, and the environment has been my underlining preoccupation. In Traffic/Landscape on Steel I painted bucolic imagery from a vantage point of a car driving down highways, the painted image merged onto metal detritus, forging playful wall-sculptures. Meadowlands, New Jersey uses this same imagery painted from life and from its corresponding satellite views concurrently. These address privacy and personal views through images collected from the internet along with my own photographs. Composite Photographs explores this digitally, merging the personal and satellite imagery mainly from bird sanctuaries in a residential neighborhood. A painting series on canvas, Suburbs, Cemeteries and Thoroughfares and the series Pearlbrook Drive fuse imagery of my hometown from memory and newly-taken photographs, attempting to make sense of the confluence of time and distance. Austria Album is comprised of images painted on screens of perforated steel, and drawings that use family photographs from my grandparent’s vacation in the Austrian Alps, before their lives were upended by World War II; the historical photographs are matched with current Google Earth views from these same locations.


My recent paintings and works on paper Almost New were created by rolling and marking. Repeated layers of color and traces of organic profiles form the surface of emerging and recessing planes. This series began during the pandemic when I stopped having an overarching concept that fueled each of my distinct landscape projects and I returned to where I had begun as an artist, to an interior vision, each painting and drawing from an abstracted sense of color and line. I focused on a process with vertically rolling color juxtaposed and submerged with suggestive linear forms. In these works, the pandemic helped to connect me with the present, delving into a very day-to-day focus for my art, reacting to the experience of repetition, political chaos and beauty. The related and on-going Arrival series emphasize color. In these thin films and shifts of paint are orchestrated and inspired by an immersion in nature.