Pictures are magic. Consider a picture of a place. Or perhaps more accurately, consider the illusion of “placeness” we are able to see in pictures — pictorial space on a two-dimensional surface organized such that it brings a three-dimensional space from imagination into tangible reality. A flat, opaque surface covered in colorful goo becomes a window into somewhere else. Magic, truly. My paintings simultaneously construct and map a painted picture world. The pictures themselves are often more diagrammatic than picturesque, self-consciously the behind-the-scenes featurette rather than the actual film. They document the interstitial spaces outside the frames of all the familiar pictures from the history of art and visual production. It is a world composed of uncanny valleys, or featureless uncanny planes. Through them I discover a set of “natural laws” singular to a place that exists only in pictures. Its great monuments are stolen from all my favorite pictures, site constructions in a vast imaginary somewhere, bounded by my limited frame of reference.

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