Wish You Were Here, 2024-25

These paintings draw inspiration from vintage advertisements featuring carousel imagery—ads that were once used to sell everything from motor oil to soft drinks. These advertisements evoke childhood innocence, leveraging sentimentality to build consumer trust and brand loyalty. In today’s media-saturated world, we are constantly inundated with messages that vary in veracity and relevance, many of which exploit nostalgia for a “better” or “simpler” time as a tool of influence. Yet, this idealized past is not universal; it often omits certain perspectives to construct a selective, polished narrative. The fragmented, stitched-together creatures in my paintings challenge this notion, confronting the viewer with unsettling combinations that disrupt the illusion of nostalgia. In doing so, they question the reliability of memory and the deceptive nature of the images we interact with every day.