ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork is political whether or not that is evident in a specific artwork. Everything I create is a reflection of my life as I occupy this body and my personal process of growing and moving. My artwork is about my history and storytelling, about interpreting the inconceivable in order to move past it and through it. It's simultaneously my refuge from, and my connection to the outside world. My artwork is always influenced by my position in the world as a white, queer, working-class, cis-gendered woman.
I've been an artist since I was 5 years old. That's when I started creating mud animals in the back yard and drying them in the hot sun of the Phoenix suburbs. At this same time I started learning piano and music theory. Eventually I started hand painting my mud creatures, and I traded my time on the piano for the violin. In High School I shifted my musical focus to electric guitar and my visual arts focus to black and white film photography. In college I studied classical guitar and continued with black and white film photography.
When I moved to Tucson and went to The University of Arizona I was powerfully attracted to the incisive feminist faculty in the printmaking and painting departments. The creative conversation there was extremely political, challenging, and stimulating. It was the first time I heard people acknowledge and directly address power and domination, suffering, and trauma. It opened up a place for me to create emotionally intense artwork and to share my stories among an audience of my peers. Poetry, storytelling, and visual analysis have always been a part of my work. Much of my artwork from this time was text heavy and filled with stories. I processed and grieved my life, and I grew into an adult.
I'm truly a multi-media artist. My parents gave me music and crafts. My dad was a pianist and my mom was endlessly creating things. She gave me so many materials to create with. I've created artworks in ceramic, oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, house and craft paints. Cut paper assemblage, printmaking, photography, videography, stories, poetry, and music.
In 2014 on a trip home, I found the mud animals in a box in the shed at my parents house. These artifacts of my creative youth were aptly swaddled in Regan-era cold war newspapers dated December 1984...relevant only because so much of my first 18 years were spent discussing and preparing for our mutually assured mass destruction, or death by rapture with the impending return of christ.
Fundamentally my artwork always addresses relationships between people or objects. We are vulnerable bodies. When we are tiny babies we are powerless. We are dominated and abused, or some people are well taken care of. Our attachment to others and to ourselves becomes established and corrupted by our early treatment. We struggle with physical or emotional intimacy. We are alienated. We repeat abusive relationships over and over again until we figure out the pattern and move to the next level. And finally we are empowered and embodied. We occupy ourselves instead of being occupied by other nations, other ideologies, other captors. I gravitate toward content that includes bodies, sexuality, touch, sound, movement, fear, intimacy, and vulnerability. I explore ideas of taking up space, while addressing alienation, otherness, invisibility and dislocation. Sometimes I use stories from the past to generate discussion in the present about these topics.
The role of the artist is important for reflecting back the culture and critiquing it. I like art that is playful or perverse and presents complicated ideas not marketed for ease of consumption. I like to create things that cause some measure of physical or psychological discomfort with the hope that it will encourage the viewer to investigate their feelings and experiences. I'm interested in using art as a resource for individual empowerment, growth and community support. I like to push normative assumptions, challenge our assumptions and hierarchies of thought, bring in experimental and anti-art, and explore identity and the social environment.
I hold a Master of Fine Arts in media arts, and a Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from The California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. I'm an independent artist and I'm constantly creating and recreating.
I've been an artist since I was 5 years old. That's when I started creating mud animals in the back yard and drying them in the hot sun of the Phoenix suburbs. At this same time I started learning piano and music theory. Eventually I started hand painting my mud creatures, and I traded my time on the piano for the violin. In High School I shifted my musical focus to electric guitar and my visual arts focus to black and white film photography. In college I studied classical guitar and continued with black and white film photography.
When I moved to Tucson and went to The University of Arizona I was powerfully attracted to the incisive feminist faculty in the printmaking and painting departments. The creative conversation there was extremely political, challenging, and stimulating. It was the first time I heard people acknowledge and directly address power and domination, suffering, and trauma. It opened up a place for me to create emotionally intense artwork and to share my stories among an audience of my peers. Poetry, storytelling, and visual analysis have always been a part of my work. Much of my artwork from this time was text heavy and filled with stories. I processed and grieved my life, and I grew into an adult.
I'm truly a multi-media artist. My parents gave me music and crafts. My dad was a pianist and my mom was endlessly creating things. She gave me so many materials to create with. I've created artworks in ceramic, oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, house and craft paints. Cut paper assemblage, printmaking, photography, videography, stories, poetry, and music.
In 2014 on a trip home, I found the mud animals in a box in the shed at my parents house. These artifacts of my creative youth were aptly swaddled in Regan-era cold war newspapers dated December 1984...relevant only because so much of my first 18 years were spent discussing and preparing for our mutually assured mass destruction, or death by rapture with the impending return of christ.
Fundamentally my artwork always addresses relationships between people or objects. We are vulnerable bodies. When we are tiny babies we are powerless. We are dominated and abused, or some people are well taken care of. Our attachment to others and to ourselves becomes established and corrupted by our early treatment. We struggle with physical or emotional intimacy. We are alienated. We repeat abusive relationships over and over again until we figure out the pattern and move to the next level. And finally we are empowered and embodied. We occupy ourselves instead of being occupied by other nations, other ideologies, other captors. I gravitate toward content that includes bodies, sexuality, touch, sound, movement, fear, intimacy, and vulnerability. I explore ideas of taking up space, while addressing alienation, otherness, invisibility and dislocation. Sometimes I use stories from the past to generate discussion in the present about these topics.
The role of the artist is important for reflecting back the culture and critiquing it. I like art that is playful or perverse and presents complicated ideas not marketed for ease of consumption. I like to create things that cause some measure of physical or psychological discomfort with the hope that it will encourage the viewer to investigate their feelings and experiences. I'm interested in using art as a resource for individual empowerment, growth and community support. I like to push normative assumptions, challenge our assumptions and hierarchies of thought, bring in experimental and anti-art, and explore identity and the social environment.
I hold a Master of Fine Arts in media arts, and a Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from The California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. I'm an independent artist and I'm constantly creating and recreating.
