Artist Statement
My work centers on working-class, midwestern American people. For the past several years, I have found it helpful to work from a fictional place — an imaginary town I named Holmes, Missouri, drawn equally from upstate New York, where I live, and Missouri, where I grew up. The striking similarities between these disparate rural landscapes allow Holmes to speak more broadly about small-town American life.
The largest painting I have made to date, Homecoming, depicts a parade moving down Main Street in Holmes, and with it I sought a wider view of the town and its community. Residents across generations appear in the work: an elderly man loosely based on my father anchors the central foreground, while a homecoming princess rides a float in the background; mothers with children, working men, and football players fill the scene between them.
The figures who populate Holmes are composites of family members and people I knew growing up — a father and son who run the local repair shop, a woman working at Walmart, a road crew maintaining the rural routes of the Missouri Ozarks. My family is spread across Northwestern Kansas, Kansas City, and the Lake of the Ozarks region, and all of these places inform my preoccupations: the texture of lived experience in a small town, the successes and struggles of working life, family relationships, and masculinity.
[Examples of my animations can be seen on my website.]
