Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.

Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience.

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.

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?

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

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.