My oil paintings utilize the form and experience of the body to investigate existential questions on pain, death, and love. My visual language moves between heavy illusionism and expressive mark making to appropriately address each of my topics. As an aspiring Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, I am constantly contemplating impermanence and suffering. These sobering meditations often serve as the inspiration behind my work. I work both figuratively and abstractly in order to fully embody the emotions at hand. Religious and spiritual tropes imbue my images with allegorical meanings. Recently my paintings have focused on tragedy and our response to tragedy. In Baroque-inspired pieces I grieve the fact that we must all die, and I sit with the pain of war and genocide. Additionally, I consider how the modern subject copes with these realities. I am particularly interested in the effects of neoliberalism on our social and psychological lives. Influenced by the texts of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, I investigate how emotionally cut off the modern subject has become. My works have been greatly inspired by my time abroad in Florence. For four months, I traveled throughout Europe to discover how the master’s understand the project of art making. I am currently doing research for a series of paintings on memory and grief. Through distorted vignettes of Brooklyn and the Caribbean, I reflect on the experience of looking back to one’s past.