Artist Statement

 

One of my fascinations with human nature is how we, as people, process our experiences; internalizing them and then reflect them back out to the world, often symbolically and unintentionally. I'm interested in what transpires during the internalization phase, our subjectivity towards self perceptions and what we fixate on. Having acknowledged my own personal idealized concepts of self and seeing them reflected in others, has become a means for expressing my own internal narratives. I create dramatic scenes, using props and characters, with a strong focus on color, to emphasize symbolism and depict various states of the idealized self.

In my most current body of work, Opposite to Nature, I have extended my focus towards portrayals of women and young girls and how they internalize the external pressures of societal roles. Particularly, I aim to illustrate the inner mingling and distorted outcome of what happens when a woman's true innate self is inevitably revealed, once replayed through external roles. In this wounded state, emotions and expressions can be displaced and even contradictory, replacing one for the other, such as food for comfort, or sex for love. Like clothes that don't fit, these themes explore how women make do with what is available to them, when trying to fit into a reality that has been put before them, only to replace their own. I often use a sense of ambiguity to emphasize the stunned and disoriented disposition of the women and a vagueness of time and historical era in my work, to allow the focus to remain on the woman's experiences as a continual re-occurance within their social environment.