I think of Alice reflecting into the other side of a broadened and intensified looking glass where fantasy and nightmare play chess with the spiritual and the physical, especially magnified in this unknown existence called Covid.

In telescopic and intimate scaled paintings and mixed media artwork, I challenge traditional natural landscapes and human landscapes, creating mythopoetic universes and transformative self-portraits in which change is mystical and sublime. Allegorically, I disrupt societal constructs and existential narratives of self, identity, gender and age stereotypes, cross-cultural connectedness and collective responsibility for nature. Making sense of non-hierarchical and spiritual systems of equality is informed by my multi-cultural Jewish/Christian/French/Armenian/USA heritage, diaspora and refugee family history and birthplace in Japan.  It is a precipice where I imagine launching into space with Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Plato. Legs dangle on the edge of fragmented liminal spaces ready to leap into a science/religion/philosophy mind-meld. 

From this height, formal language of abstraction and realism is ruptured and conflated. I experiment with varied viscosities of acrylic and oil paint, grittiness of sand paper, luminosity of stand oil and the coolness of clay. By design or accident, systems of saturated greens, reds, oranges and violets charge with intensity and texture. Layers of dripping and oozing abstraction become primordial melting moss and floating fauna. Constellations of natural imagery and human made technologies that I pattern, weave in and out of existence like a game of celestial hide and seek. Clouds are the dominant playgrounds in which my deer, bulls, cement plants and water towers orbit. Their anomalies in scale symbolize every Alice who shrinks and expands in an unpredictable wonderland, as she/we navigate life’s unpredictable dualities of harmony and tension, and control and chaos.