I could name many women who travel or who work with America as a theme. I think it was more not being able to name canonical women, whose work is part of the American canon.

One of the reasons I work serially, but also one of the reasons that I try to claim space in painting, is I'm desperately interested in asking: How can a group of images, or even two images, have meaning together?

We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it.

Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.

For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

Painting is the chance to create a different space, or different way of picturing a literal stream of images.

There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.