My work often begins with familiar images and objects that carry personal and collective associations. In this piece, A Dream Reassembled, I return to a childhood memory of wanting to become a ballerina, a dream held with absolute certainty before life and newer dreams began to reshape it. The artwork holds both the original fantasy and its present realization, capturing the liberating vulnerability of a dream finally claimed on my own terms.
Past and present exist simultaneously. One side holds the immediacy of the present, where a woman inhabits the dream from a different stage of life, with an ordinary marker of contemporary reality resting at her feet. On the reverse side, a painted and altered ballerina doll stands poised on a gift box, accompanied by traces of childhood toys that seep through the canvas surface. Together, these two figures occupy a space between aspiration and reality, innocence and self-awareness, fulfillment and longing.
Front and back, past and present, painting and object are physically connected. The work exposes its seams, edges, support structures, underpainting, sketches, stains, and accumulated layers. Rather than concealing its construction, it reveals it. The exposed layers and fragments allow earlier and later states to remain visible at once. Together, the two sides reflect and interrupt one another. They coexist, overlap, and reshape each other, remaining in continuous conversation.
2026, Mixed media on joined canvases and found objects, 30 x 39 x 7 inches
