Wish You Were Here, 2024-25

Memory isn’t a reliable witness - it skips, distorts, and reshapes the past to fit the present. In this body of work, nostalgia functions not as a gentle remembrance, but as a warped lens - bent by time, emotion, and desire. The images recall the visual language of another era, but they aren’t sentimental tributes. They’re distortions - memories dressed up for a reunion, trying to pass as something they’re not.

Drawing from vintage advertising and mid-century ephemera, these pieces reimagine cultural artifacts once designed to sell everything from motor oil to soft drinks. In doing so, they employ comfort, simplicity, and certainty. Among these familiar motifs, the carousel appears as a recurring symbol - long used in advertising to conjure feelings of childhood joy, innocence, and wonder, even when promoting products that have little to do with play. Its imagery suggests a return to simpler times, smoothing over complexity with a smile.

But here, the carousel spins off its axis. Its animals are exquisite corpse creatures- hybrids stitched together from mismatched parts, more uncanny than comforting. Like memory itself, these creatures are assembled not with precision, but with invention and desire.

These works ask what we choose to remember, what we forget, and how those decisions shape our sense of self. Nostalgia here is not benign - it’s a beautiful illusion, fractured and seductive, inviting us to look closer at the stories we tell ourselves about the past.