♪ ♪ There's something kind of mysterious about these little areas of the US.

In the Midwest or in the middle of nowhere, like rural Minnesota.

After not living there for several years.

I've been able to come back to it with a different perspective.

♪ ♪ I realize there is a lot of charged energy within Minnesota, in small town rural America, that I wasn't really considering before.

I guess, what are those little secrets that are within these isolated spaces, thinking about that sort of potential energy or its release?

♪ ♪ I was looking at a lot of archival images from the library.

Historic images from the 1920s, things like that, and I liked the quality of them, how they're not super staged, but they feel like they're capturing information.

Kind of like a scientific evidence photo.

I'm also really interested in duality of images or several things happening at the same time, without the ability to separate them or find a definitive narrative.

I'm cutting away information to access that hidden away energy.

I'm trying to paint the breaths between the actual concrete markers.

♪ ♪ The foundation or starting point of the new sculptures I'm working on, starts with collecting a lot of objects and things that have had their own sort of past life, where they've belonged to someone else.

I'm not exactly sure where the sculptures will end up in their final form, but I think that's the most exciting part.

Being really present with the materials and figuring out the relationships and what we can learn from them.

I'm always finding threads in my web crossing and showing up in unexpected ways in both painting and sculpture.

An important part of my work is removal.

By removing context by shifting the frame, I'm interested in new possibilities.

This allows for more expansion outside of the picture plane.

If I take away enough information from myself, that I don't really recognize what is happening.

I've kind of gotten it to a place where some of those things can happen, and the sort of re-understanding of ambiguity.

A reintroduction to the common or normal information seems to be good.

Just generally speaking.

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