“Drawing from a variety of pop cultural, historical, and autobiographical imagery, my thesis work explores the strange and surreal quality of the image as a vehicle for the pagan. I use the word pagan (drawing from feminist academic Camille Paglia’s book Sexual Personae) to describe the murky sexual undercurrents found in Western mythology, literature, and visual culture from antiquity to the present day. Drawing on reference images culled from across the internet, photographs of my friends, and symbols from my upbringing in rural Northern Ontario, I approach my paintings as a stage, highlighting theatrical representations of the body and its surroundings that taken out of their original contexts feel jarring and unfamiliar. Luxury goods and dislocated body parts are basked in perpetual darkness, statues are adorned with facial filler, Scooby-Doo becomes a transsexual icon; what is shared across these images is looming sense of both the cursed and enchanted, “[a] dream world where nature reigns, where there is no law but sex, cruelty, and metamorphosis.” By positioning these images in relation to each other, my thesis work is an attempt to create new mythologies of the self.”