Looking Into the Distance Becomes Difficult is a personal response to upsetting contemporary realities, namely the refugee crisis in Europe. Each work takes as its starting point a journalistic photograph found on the Internet, which is then abstracted and fractured to reflect and deal with the intense emotions surrounding these images and the concomitant stories of people fleeing war, persecution, torture, rape and hopelessness. No attempt is made to create a literal representation or a similar narrative; rather, fragmentation and abstraction function as a means to a more universal comprehension of these deep and fundamental emotions, while a counter-intuitive palette expresses the naive yet arguably beautiful dreams undeniably at play in the midst of this ongoing tragedy. Call it hope.