"Attempts at keeping the hair left it unkept."
Part of the Cat Party group exhibition The Secret Bangs.
Part of the Cat Party group exhibition The Secret Bangs.
The Center of the Universe
Nervous System
BFA Thesis Exhibition
BFA Thesis Exhibition
Nervous System is an obsessive justification of a real or imagined traumatic existence. Systematic applications of material allow me to get lost in the therapeutic and solipsistic process of making. Through this repetition I can enter a welcomed trance-like state and temporarily forget my anxiety. Ultimately it is about healing from imagined threats to my deliberately sheltered mental existence, threats that I perceive as a reality.
The lumps of pink flesh in Lurker, Dweller, Scraper, and Scrounger are physical manifestations in paint of this existence. They are creatures caught in their own perpetual state of self-sustainment. Like the feral nature of a wild animal or the selfishness of a spoiled child, they exist purely for their own sensation and nothing else, in a dark and free-floating womb. The Little Wombs, having been made from ripping holes in balloons, conceives a link among fertility, sexuality, girlhood, and the traumatic loss of this girlhood. Each one is a shell of safety that is protected from the outside world. Eventually this shell is pierced and we are no longer behind our shroud of innocence.
Innocence, particularly that of a young girl, is generally defined by society as being white, pure, and clean. My interpretation is nearly the antithesis of this; the dirty neon encrusted mass of Turtles all the way down presents the ungodly revelry of the world in which a child plays. Perhaps this is the only way I can interpret it; the purity is, after all, only half-remembered, and will always be filtered through its own loss and the realities of the world that I now know and continue to learn.
Everyone is Everything uproots an accepted system with a system of my own - a white-noise-like, patterned display of colorful paint and glitter dots on scantron test sheets. The dots are painted on the identification section of the scantron, thereby making the silly and yet entirely serious statement that "I am everything."
The lumps of pink flesh in Lurker, Dweller, Scraper, and Scrounger are physical manifestations in paint of this existence. They are creatures caught in their own perpetual state of self-sustainment. Like the feral nature of a wild animal or the selfishness of a spoiled child, they exist purely for their own sensation and nothing else, in a dark and free-floating womb. The Little Wombs, having been made from ripping holes in balloons, conceives a link among fertility, sexuality, girlhood, and the traumatic loss of this girlhood. Each one is a shell of safety that is protected from the outside world. Eventually this shell is pierced and we are no longer behind our shroud of innocence.
Innocence, particularly that of a young girl, is generally defined by society as being white, pure, and clean. My interpretation is nearly the antithesis of this; the dirty neon encrusted mass of Turtles all the way down presents the ungodly revelry of the world in which a child plays. Perhaps this is the only way I can interpret it; the purity is, after all, only half-remembered, and will always be filtered through its own loss and the realities of the world that I now know and continue to learn.
Everyone is Everything uproots an accepted system with a system of my own - a white-noise-like, patterned display of colorful paint and glitter dots on scantron test sheets. The dots are painted on the identification section of the scantron, thereby making the silly and yet entirely serious statement that "I am everything."
Easter Eggs
Easter Eggs was a collaborative exhibition with my younger brother. (Only my work is featured here.) As siblings who grew up immersed in video games, we found that our obsessive need for a sense of control in our lives could be satisfied by playing them. "Easter Eggs," a term used to describe glitches, cheats, hidden treasure, or secrets in video game culture, explores this virtual escapist world through a variety of mixed media work and uses video games as a metaphor for indulgence, childhood ephemera, a false sense of security, as well as our own relationship as siblings and artists.
Where I Was Found
The paintings, sculptures, and installation in Where I Was Found act as relics leftover from implied private but ambiguous acts such as rituals,
violence, or intimacy. Layers
of garish paint, party streamers, plastic bags, paper towels, and glitter
create an obnoxious mass of encrusted cheapness or vulgarity in a deliberate
attempt to appeal to that repressed part of our nature that craves such things. I have taken lost or fearful characters and placed them in constructed physical environments that at once provoke humorous and
uncomfortable reactions and prompts questions about the nature of the
character’s anxiety, an anxiety that we heavily empathize with and see
ourselves in. The cartoons are stand-ins
or symbols for humans at their worst: anxiety-ridden, gluttonous, and
pleasure-seeking, obsessively seeking a fix in a continuous and absurd loop of
fear and desire.