My Work

Since my early childhood, I have used limitations to inspire and propel my creativity. As an artist, my visual storytelling is based on personalized design systems. I construct underpaintings out of collage, sifting through mainstream lifestyle, craft, humorous, and news magazines from (roughly) the 1940s through 1970s. I look for colors, gestures, and contexts that strike me. The gender, race, and class norms portrayed in advertisements and stories invite my curiosity as I explore my own American cultural history.

My Process

I deconstruct and re-construct figures and scenes from the magazine photographs to re-contextualize, curate, and rearrange cultural material into new narratives set in mundane but surreal settings. Using paint as my editing tool, I work on top of the collages to flatten and distill the scene down to its focal point, creating a united scene out of fractured elements. My figures, buildings, animals, and urban and wild landscapes are inherently off-kilter and awkward — pieced together from fragments and scraps. I explore the space where vulnerability, alienation, and connection meet up or try to meet up. Using formal means (shading and perspective, primarily) I invite my viewer to pause and enter into the visual space — to believe the absurd, the unlikely, the ambiguous — and then to construct their own personal narrative. By capturing a moment of action and interaction in a kind of frozen, surreal choreography, I am exploring what it means to be complicatedly inter-connected.

Artist CV