This group of mixed media paintings on paper and wood look at human bodies as archives, with a focus on body language as a signifier of class, power, culture, longing and absence. I make paintings to navigate the expression of desire and loss, particularly during this unusual time. The loss of intimacy and touch yet also not having private space and time when quarantined with others. My interests lie in how we navigate and interpret objects, memory, materials and space and how this can define the body with an emphasis on the representation of the body as a site of subtle slippage, disruption and/or dislocation, an intended slippage between observation and illusion. I am drawn to topics involving the limitations and dissonance between the body, representation and the mediated image. I have always been interested in beginning my paintings and drawings from observation, looking at skin, light, shadow, muscles, fat, body position and understanding how careful observation can create desire but also removal. Most of the figures come from direct observation or my own photographs of family and friends. In my recent paintings, I began to layer shapes, patterns, color and thin washes of paint over figures to interrupt the course of looking, seeing the parts over the whole and trying to expose the ways in which we choose to “share” small intimate parts of our lives in the larger public domain. Fundamentally my work is getting at questions of how we can read and interpret the act of representation critically, in order to consider how it may or may not function as a form of ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’.