Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

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

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

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.

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.