The paintings in Cross Words (1996 – 1998), each formatted in scrabble-like constructions, combine the intellectual fun of wordplay with the pleasure of painting. By superimposing familiar expressions onto partial maps of the continent, which in turn are in-filled with images and patterns, these works collectively paint a psychological portrait of North America.

Within each work, known political boundaries of the continent are replaced and reframed with new imagistic demarcations. These references — US Army camouflage, laser-guided missile imagery, remotely sensed weather maps, microscopic cellular phenomena, scrambled TV distortions, and video marginalia — playfully conflate their readings with the constructed phrases, creating associations which allude to geo-political location and the mediated landscape of the continent.

Encaustic is a 2500 year-old painting method where pigment is added to melted wax. The transparency of the wax and the emotional ‘hotness’ of the medium, where individual paint strokes mimic digital pixels, intend to comment on how an ancient technique is used to depict the coolness of 21st Century digital culture framed by the glass of the TV monitor as prosthetic window on the world.

The single words in Vacant Paintings (1999) meld over-used media terms with images selected from North American weather maps and satellite imaging systems that represent the parallel, elusive phenomenon of weather.