ARTIST STATEMENT

Throughout my practice, I use art as a way to cope with and make sense of the unsensible, whether this is grief from individual loss or the collective grief of living in the dehumanizing systems of capitalist violences. As a conceptual and interdisciplinary artist, my materials are determined by the ideas I am exploring resulting in photos, sculptures, videos, installations, and performances.

      Much of my earlier work was inspired by the death of my mother to cancer in my twenties. Using photos, sculptures, and performances, I grappled with the unreliable nature of memory and the body. My work ranges in scale, from small cyanotype collages of my mother’s obscured image on fabric and paper, to the 9’x8.5’x15’ Passage, an outdoor installation of corrugated metal and cast iron. Passage borrows imagery from culverts and bell tongues to create a contemplative space in nature that welcomes viewers to sit with the discomfort of loss and transition. In series like Reformations, I used clothing and found objects to create illuminated photographs that explore the fallible nature of memory and the body and point to our inability to remold these remnants into a full recapturing of personhood in the wake of loss. 

      I am currently in a new chapter of my work, inspired by my experiences as a case manager at a homeless shelter and as a decarceration activist. Using photocopiers, identification documents, and office supplies, I explore the dehumanizing processes of bureaucracy in capitalism and the challenges of imagining alternative futures. In my Verifying series, I repeatedly photocopied pictures of my naked body, degrading their quality over time. I subsequently layered these images back onto my body with a projector, taking photos of the jarring juxtaposition between physical body and projected form to question what is omitted in attempts to represent and measure personhood. In videos like Vital Check, I projected photocopied images of my government ID onto natural materials like trees and undulating grass, to highlight the strangeness of commonplace violences that are normalized in the systems we live within and to challenge the idea of what we should accept as natural. 

       Drawing from theories of Marxist alienation, I question how current capitalist systems separate people from each other, from themselves, from nature, and from the goods and supports needed for a thriving life. While my work wrestles with this heaviness, I also aim to invite viewers to imagine that change is possible. I find inspiration in nature and the way organic systems symbolize possibilities for change and rebirth. In the piece Earth Longings, I explored the struggle between feelings of futility and the desire for change by trying to use the wheels of an office chair to dig its own grave in a forest floor, eventually making a print with the muddied wheels on paper. As I move forward with my work, I hope to inspire introspection and conversations on the challenges of attempting to thrive in an unequal world and the possibilities of imagining alternative futures of connection and abundance.