Let’s start with the title of the exhibition, “Time Travelers and Ghost Ships.” What was the inspiration for that title, and how does it relate to your paintings?

The broader working title for my current work comes from the quote “your history is your future.” This evolved as I began to integrate sculptural figures into the the interiors and landscapes which had always been a part of my practice. The figures were not contemporary, but came from earlier historic periods; from antiquity to pre-modern. I was interested in how incorporating these figures changed the more formal concerns that were the normal part of my practice.They became time travelers/ghosts from the past in a modern landscape, a time not of their own.

I’ve also noticed that several of the paintings’ titles reference the four seasons. Why did you choose the seasons as a temporal anchor for this subset of paintings?

That evolved organically. I was trying to place the figures, in this case the ship, into an “altered” environment: one that appeared natural but was actually an artifice, an artificial or “man made” environment. The first was Summer, with the ship appearing in a park in summer. The ship was evocative, and as such became an object that kept “asking” to reappear in other guises. I had a collection of landscapes that were modified by human intervention that I was interested in—various parks, both recreational and industrial. The second painting was in another park, and I became intrigued in the formal properties of color, the autumn yellows as opposed to summer greens. From this I did the white one—Winter. It seemed logical from there to to complete the series with spring.

In your statement for this exhibition, you mentioned that the ship that appears in these paintings is from The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while the sculptural figures are from the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in Manhattan. What’s the significance of these museums and these specific objects to you?

All of my work is photographically based. I spend time taking photos of images that attract me, and have a large library of them, taken randomly and intuitively. I browse these photos, and spend time recombining them based on the concerns of my current work.

I have been taking photos of sculpture for many years, but it did not start appearing in my work until about 10 years ago. Historically, my work was always a set of polyptychs in which the various components were meant to recontextualize the final piece—a kind of visual narrative. When I began to integrate the figures I found that a single image was visually clearer than multiple ones, and I went to my photo library for resources.

It was important to me that the figures read as metaphors, that they could exist in the environment but not be actually of it, and that there were differences in their physicality from a representation of an actual human.

I’ve spent a lot of time at the Met and in the Kunsthistorisches, so I had lots of photos. For a while I was using the work of the ivory carver The Master of The Furies, whose work is incredibly expressive. I felt like he was a collaborator. As the work went on I needed to bring other elements in, so I went back to my library and found that the ship had properties that worked well.

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