Through my paintings I hope to exploit the ways in which standardized beauty operates within contemporary society.  The art historical trope of the pastoral nude provides the context for exploring a violent collision between this idea of standardized beauty and the grotesque.  I seek to transform the pastoral nude into a fusion of pornographic imagery and abstract brushwork, which comprises machine-like organisms of undulating flesh, disjointed limbs, and externalized internal organs.  These landscapes exhibit the contemporary attempt at universalizing beauty: restricting, drilling, binding, and transforming the body into a massive flesh wound of homogenized and mechanically reproduced territory, much like the contemporary environmental landscape.  Plastic surgery, acrylic nails, and commodified sexuality serve as motifs that represent the pain we inflict upon our bodies to achieve beauty. 

            The elusive nature of pornography, the way that it functions beneath the lace of society’s lingerie as simultaneously visible and invisible, also interests me.  Porn occupies a significant part of the American population’s private life, but becomes censored and subliminal within public discourse.  I seek to create paintings which illuminate this relationship between revealment and concealment.