The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.