Working as a painter is an interesting thing. There is in many ways a pact with history when you pick up a brush and paint, that what you make will outlive you, and leave a mark. So as painters we are chronicalers and storytellers. I find that by looking through art history, queer art and punk art are rarely the magnum opus of a collection. Yet there is nothing that warms my heart more to see than evidence of those things, like an imprint saying ‘we were here’. My work is for me a way to chronicle queer joy, to capture forms of lgbt identity. As Fellini said “All art is autobiographical” and I find this extremely true of my work. 

I first committed to the idea of preservation in my work with my undergrad collection Wanted, which I spent three years developing. It was a way for me to speak about the way in which the true history of who came out West was LGBT people as they had more rights there than they did on the East Coast. When I first started to learn about this I felt betrayed by my education in Idaho and the way my schools had sung the song of “good christian family values” when we were taught about things like manifest destiny, and the oregon trail. In reality, the song of the earliest western photographs of people depicting queer couples and trans individuals. So very quickly in undergrad the shift of my work became a way to chronicle the ideas and beliefs of these early migrators. I felt a profound need to scream this from the rooftop for anyone who’d listen. I find that this work solidified in my head the need to depict queer identity was a fundamental tenet of what my art meant.