Girls' School marked a turn — from using myself as my subject to painting others, and from conceptual strategies into the slower medium of paint. I pictured young girls in their school uniforms, posed in domestic tableaux, at that transitional age between childhood and adulthood. The luscious color and cozy compositions leave you unprepared for the melancholy, seduction, or menace in their faces. The girls became ciphers for the same question that runs through all my work: how identity is constructed, and by whom.