STATEMENT:
I am a visual artist and an archaeologist. My work has both social and studio components that are reified by anthropological pursuits. I am engaged in a tangled relationship between “soft science” and art.
As an archaeologist, I’ve learned that the trash of human existence defines our future history. The work leans heavily on the employment of upcycled objects, discarded objects, or found objects. I work with alternative process photography, painting, drawing, textiles, and installation. Not all trash is created equal, thus the choice of materials used is specific to the conceptual underpinnings of each project. The use of trash is deliberately tethered to socio-economic signifiers in an attempt to transcend its origins. My process has photographic beginnings, documentation captures this world and while the painting process transports it to another one. This world is soft, kitschy, emotional, and often child-like in countering the crisp lines of reality. Using the cyanotype process pioneered by artists and scientist Anna Atkins for botany, I employ it to describe the Anthropocene. The prints are colored in a similar fashion to the early female artisans of filmography, who were only allowed to use their creative voice by color black and white film strips to create a more vibrant experience.
What makes human existence worthwhile in the wake of our impossibly destructive tendencies are art and empathy. Our capacity to care when it will not benefit oneself in any material way is a lighthouse, especially during the country-dark of the ecocide and climate crisis. Our millennia-stretching record of externalizing the existential weight of our inner worlds to sublimation feels like an eternally bursting spring. Here, we can drink poetry, food, art, music, performance, etc. until we are drunk on ourselves, creating more food for the following generations.