As a painter I consider myself a journalist in the same way my retired white house photographer father turned Los Angeles social worker was. Using the immediacy of my iPhone to capture moments where politics, culture, class, gender, and ecology are made visually manifest I then paint these images, rendering the human hand involved obvious and undeniable. In a world increasingly inundated with images and a decreasing media literacy the bias and agenda of photography, “deep fakes”, and AI are highlighted and questioned by every visible brushstroke in my work, and the viewer is forced to interrogate the reality I am painting.

My current focus is painting the bottles of urine that dot the shoulders of our roadways. I hunt for these images, scanning the sides of freeways, walking out along thoroughfares, and asking my cohort to send me images of any bottles they may encounter. This work is as much about the nature the bottles land in as the road they line. Los Angeles is a uniquely car dependent city whose many freeways delineate racial, class, and ecological struggles as they redline communities, connect those same city-bound urbanites to abundant nature, all while bottlenecking the genetics of the animals and plants divided by 8 lanes of high speed traffic. The “Piss Bottle” encapsulates this: the division of labor along race, gender, and class, and our inherent participation in ecology despite constant cultural posturing that we are somehow above and removed from it.

The work is also about volume, the act of collecting, and value ascribed to objects. My hairstylist mother shops at flea markets, thrift stores, and big-box retailers: exchanging money for objects that inevitably collect dust out of a feeling of economic insecurity. A piss bottle is another human creative output, and by rendering them in the medium of oil paint, long reserved for the wealthy, I birth another object to consume that questions the wisdom of the economic system whose insatiable need for infinite growth necessitated its creation.