Artist Statement
Grounded in traditional drawing and painting, my artistic practice continues to extend into the realms of the temporal through performance, film, and animation. Observational, figurative, and gestural drawing provide a basis on which my work evolves into large scale multidisciplinary projects synthesizing experimental and traditional modes of artistic production.
Informed by feminist and queer theory, these works often use or assume identities as a vehicle to explore the self’s relationship to the world, the internal and external, the subjective and objective. Assuming the heteronormative role of a young mother and employing tragicomic humor and ironic naïveté, the Cooking at Home series unpacks gender roles in cooking shows and art-making. The Jenny Dove series interrogates our ever increasing obsession with personal narratives, by performing the young female country star more artifact and memorabilia than talent. The Donor Series imagines the offspring as result of donated eggs sold in order to continue an artists practice and Miasma performs Ann Carson’s translation of Sophokle’s Antigone. Translated, recorded, degrading with metaphor and meaning lost, we are left with language out of context.
The collaborative work undertaken with Syracuse University students as part of the Alper Fellowship award, The Monogram is a large-scale film screening with live choreographed dancing. Based upon the poem of the same title, written by Odysseas Elytis, the film component of this work employs derive’, taking a psycho-geographic approach to landscape, and memory. 16mm film is interwoven with multi-plane animation to create a sensory mapping of place. Screened in front of a live audience, choreographed dance extends the work into the lived. The exhibition or gallery component of this work includes additional 16mm projection with CNC milled Corian, that when backlit reveal a serial drawing of moments “translated” from Elytis’ poem.