The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

When you're not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning... you can't do that when you have two children!

The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.