Throughout history, every culture has had its own collective vision of a more perfect state of existence, termed as heaven, utopia, nirvana, the afterlife, and Mount Olympus among other names. Images of these realms often have been romanticized versions of a society’s earthly reality, incorporating glorified elements of everyday life. My paintings comment on our own cultural glorification as well as on how our political and cultural landscape is shifting. As we slide closer and closer to global crisis, I’ve begun to question whether there will be a future; or at least a future with humans in it. These paintings reflect my fears and yet also represent my hopes for the post-apocalypse. Maybe what remains after devastation will be the Utopia we had collectively imagined, rather than the dystopia we fear.
