Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I’m a painter based in Chicago, where I am originally from. I teach painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I paint with distemper, a delicate and ancient painting medium made from rabbit skin glue, pigment, and calcium carbonate. I work with and against time. I don’t produce. Rather, I prepare to receive a signal. I wait. I empty myself out and begin again. Futures are lost, but not forgotten. The dead are always close by. I practice what it means to pay attention. Eventually there is recognition. Only in hindsight, I am able to see. 

Considering your experimental use of material, it’s never clear to even you how a painting might look in its final stage. How do you know when it’s done?

I know a painting is done when it feels entirely disconnected from me. More recently, I lose my memory when I work. Sometimes I return to the studio and have no recollection of making the work that’s in there. I only know which ones are finished because they become vampires that poach my attention. They stare back at me and hold me there awhile, even when I don’t even want to look at them. The finished ones exhaust me more than the unfinished ones. The finished painting has something to tell me that I don’t currently know, and I don’t really know when it will tell me. Sometimes I just go to my studio to stare back. 

There are paintings that I treat with care and ones that I treat with a lack thereof. The ones I treat disrespectfully are unfinished. I allow myself to be aggressive with them. The finished ones get much better treatment. I’m always checking on them, making sure that they’re safe from the temperature changes in my studio. I always lean the unfinished ones on top of the finished ones to give them more protection from the sun and air. Materially speaking, the paintings are all quite fragile regardless of whether they are finished or not. Their surfaces are like eggshells, and they often crack on their own accord. The environment they live in is what fucks them up. I’ve always been interested in that kind of thing, materially speaking. In the face of work’s material instability, the act of trying to care for these fragile objects is just as much part of the practice as the act of painting. It’s about life. 

How do you see your work evolving in parallel to things that are going on around you right now?

Everything feels so unstable. Each and every day under the Trump administration feels haunted. The air is tainted no matter what day it is, and everything feels ominous. Bad news is always looming. I’m more anxious than usual. I can sense this in the work too. These feelings of unease are familiar to me, though. I grew up in the kind of environment where the sky was always falling, and the ground was often ripped out from underneath me. Painting has a special way of addressing that feeling. It’s a way to place myself and see it reflected back to me in real time. I have an object in front of me that’s a factual record of an event that happened. It helps me build trust in myself and in the world. These days, what I need is something I can rely on that can also hold space for contradiction. Paintings can hold tenderness, doubt, anger, and quietness all at once. Since the inauguration, I’ve made more work than I usually would over the course of three months or so. I don’t have enough distance from the new work to know how it’s evolving. All I know is that I have a lot that I need to document, and it feels urgent.  

Do you have a specific intention with your use of color?

Yeah, I use color to play with time. By mixing calcium carbonate into distemper, the color becomes highly desaturated and matte as it dries. In turn, the color looks muted, weathered, decrepit, and aged. I want the paintings to look old. Distemper is a hard medium to paint with because the colors dry significantly lighter than how I painted them initially. The paintings change even when I’m not there. There are times when I leave the studio excited about something I just made, only to come back the next day and find that what I painted before is completely gone. There’s so much loss wrapped up in this process. Color shifts are a big part of that. Figuratively speaking, I’m a bit blind when I’m painting. I’m trying to paint something that I can’t really see to begin with, and I don’t think it’s necessary for me to have full control over that. I have nothing to go on other than my belief that something significant will eventually reveal itself, again and again. 

What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?

I think that social media platforms give us a lens into what other people are doing artistically at such a massive scale – people we know, people we admire from afar, people we’ll never meet, etc. It broadens our scope of what’s out there, but it can also present challenges when it comes to making. On one hand, it’s natural to try and find your tribe in the artworld. I think we are always trying to navigate this as artists, and social media has become a tool to help us with that. It can make the world feel bigger and full of possibility. On the other hand, I think that when artists associate themselves with others based exclusively on common aesthetic values (especially online), it can lead to artists placing high value on creating things that will align themselves with a particular group. In turn, they might not take creative risks out of fear of being cast out. There really needs to be more room for failure and risk taking. I think that slowly but surely artists are beginning to reject these platforms. Whether they continue to exist or not, the most important thing is to develop your own work and not what the market or your friends deem as important, trendy, or cool, because it’s not sustainable in the long term, and sustainability is everything. 

I frequently find my encounters with your works as emphasizing the beauty of frequently dismissed details in our collective environment. Can you speak on this?

Beauty is never something I strive for, but I’m happy when a viewer can walk away with that experience. I have a certain distrust when it comes to perception, meaning that I don’t take anything for face value. Things are not what they seem to be. Details are rarely “dismissed.” Reading between the lines is an important skill for survival. I apply this kind of distrust before, during, and after painting. I wish I wasn’t this way. But I am. 

On the other hand, I know your work is sometimes an emulation or reflection of the body, subtly referencing the history of painting as a medium in doing so. Are either of these interpretations more important than the other? Does it matter?

There are two kinds of intelligences: one that lives in the brain and another that lives in the body. When I’m painting, my body intelligence does most of the work. I believe that the body remembers things the brain won’t allow itself to. In regard to referencing the history of painting… let’s just say I talk to a lot of dead people. They’re everywhere. They talk back. Catching a ghost is hard work. 

Is there any source material you find extremely relevant to your practice right now?

After grad school, I read a book called Premonition by Luc Tuymans. In this book, Tuymans says that “Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void. The observer should become motionless before the picture, freeze. A kind of picture terror. The effect they should have on the viewer resembles an assault that he or she does not experience directly, but from a distance initially. When he or she comes closer, this assault should loom again, but on a different level…This can only come about in a certain silence. I mean the silence before the storm. It is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of deja vu.” After reading this book, I began a two-year long search for print reproductions of every Luc Tuymans painting that has ever existed. I wanted to dig deeper into what his notion of “silence” looks like throughout his oeuvre. I recently acquired Volume 1 through 3 of the Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné. I think he does unease better than anybody. What keeps me coming back to Tuymans and these books is his exploration of memory—what is remembered, what fades, and what is lost. I believe that recollection is always distortion, a form of abstraction. In some respects, I think we’re both trying to bring back the dead. 

Do you think the installation of your paintings could somehow take on a sculptural based relationship? Is this something you think about?

The paintings have always had an object quality to them—I don’t think of them as sculptures, but they can live among sculptural objects or readymades that set a specific environment, mood, or tone for the work. The first and only time I ever did this was in a solo show I did last summer called Superstition at Slow Dance in Chicago. I exhibited a cuckoo clock also known as my family’s Death Clock. This clock is a family heirloom passed down in my mother’s family since 1902. The lore passed down from generation to generation is that when someone in the family dies, the clock stops ticking on the day of their death and must be subsequently rewound. The clock was ticking throughout the show, and there was this unsettling feeling that it could stop at any moment. The paintings were arranged in a processional around the clock, daring it to stop. The clock and the paintings worked together to create an environment. They both embodied and projected a tactile sense of time. There’s little difference between the Death Clock and any of my paintings, which is why it worked. The clock now functions as a tool in my studio. I need it to be there, ticking while I’m painting. I would consider exhibiting like I did for Superstition again, but I’m not actively making or looking for objects that set a specific environment, mood, or tone for the work. For me, that kind of thing would have to naturally arrive without conscious effort – or else it becomes a gimmick.

Do you think collaboration is important and/or inherent to being an artist?

I think my thoughts on this have evolved drastically over time. Before grad school, I was painting on my own and never showed anyone my work. I used to believe that collaboration was just not something I needed to be a painter. I had a great teacher in grad school, Dana DeGiulio. She taught me that no one ever really makes anything alone. This really changed my thinking. I’m never really alone in the studio. There are so many loves, influences, legacies, histories, everyday encounters and experiences that influence what happens in there. And then there’s the collaboration that can happen outside the studio. If I can make work that allows for people to enter themselves and the messiness that comes with that – then that’s a collaboration too. 

Can you tell us a memory of someone interacting with your work that frequently crosses your mind?

I’ve had an experience with someone telling me that they were frustrated by the fact that they can’t identify what they are seeing in my work. To me this is a wonderful thing. Ambiguity is the glue that holds it all together. There are forms in my paintings that feel familiar enough to make associations, but I think they fall apart quickly. This can be disorienting and uncomfortable. People like to name things and categorize them. When categorization and language fail, devaluation or simplification often follow. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in. I hope that the work invites viewers to navigate an unstable and illegible space for even just a moment. Then maybe I’ve nudged something. 

What is something that you’ve always wanted to do and are working towards achieving?

I want to make an exhibition that people want to return to. I’m working towards an upcoming solo exhibition at Twelve Ten Gallery in 2026.

 

Interview conducted and edited by Liam Owings