Artist Statement
Upstate New York is an opulent landscape, immortalized by the Hudson River painters, containing mills and factories abandoned in the aftermath of waning industrialization, and residents struggling with gentrification. As a resident, I am interested in, and regularly confronted by, this dichotomy. I paint images gleaned from Hudson River School pieces, and then intermix, within and over those scenes, contemporary convenience store-inspired imagery. Collectively titled “Dollar Tree,” the interplay of these two types of imagery suggests the visual confusion of our social media saturated world.
