The Species Dreams portraits are ink drawings of regulars customers who came into the drugstore where I worked as a cashier for two years, on East Hastings Street in Vancouver.

It's obviously very repetitive work to scan chips and pop and shampoo for five hours so I made a study of the faces and textures and noticed the patterns and preferences of the regulars and, in the zoney haze of classic rock and the hum of the pepsi machine I'd go into my own dreamtime over the course of this detached human interaction. You might be one of those people who says Hi to the clerks, but most people don't pay any attention to the cashier. One day one of the regulars came in to show everyone a small oil painting he made and I asked him for a copy. In exchange I gave him a copy of all these faces in columns and rows. The papers for these portraits are accounts records from an old printing company in East Van. You can see the turquoise ink and even handwriting of each entry.

21x26 cm gouache, collage, acrylic on paper 2009