My current body of work is an aggregate of sources, images, and fictions drawn from American history, and seen through the lens of autobiography and poetic narrative. I am particularly interested in the American West from 1848-1900 as a location and a jumping-off point for allegorical images that nod to cinema and history-painting, but that ultimately tell a much less linear story. As in Swann’s Way or Slaughterhouse Five, the ‘memories’ I address are fluid, and not only jump back and forth in time, but also slip easily from collective cultural memories (and fictions) to my own personal memories of growing up in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. The narratives told through the paintings are allegorical and cultural metaphors, but they are also increasingly metaphors for the practice of painting itself. Conflating the artist and art-making with invented and historically-referenced frontier archetypes allows me to begin to speak in a more personal way about the interaction of human-created (and thus human-centered) objects with the non-human world.