artist statement
I am an active listener and visual storyteller. Understanding the notion of storytelling as an act with two opposing directions that can be interwoven to tap into the gloriously messy contradictions, cognitive dissonance, joys, lamentations, and experiences of the expansive, varying human experience. Storytelling defined as both an act of truth telling, uncovering what has been lost as well as a process of “making up: (sometimes absurd, off center) narratives through imaginative, inventive play — embracing that sometimes serious problems require silly solutions.
My work aims to nurture intersections of visual art, social practice, and research-based interventions. Within my capacity as a visual artist, my work spans various media including drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, installations, audio/visual, photo/film. My research foci often emerge in the studio through topics such as practices of care, cultural (dissonant) heritage, belonging and identity, mapping, public space, and identifying visual meeting points of body, mind, and memory/cultural/sociopolitical/physical landscape through abstraction. I’ve been focused on exploring concepts such as “memoryscapes” which can be defined as 1) spatial representations socially-shared memory, 2) the action of listening to located oral accounts as a way to map individual and collective stories, and 3) a way to trace both the past and present cultural landscape.
My background in formal and informal education, community building, and cross-cultural dialogue shows up across my various fellowships, residencies, grant projects, and more recently in my capacity as a Community Engagement Manager with Humanity in Action, an international leadership development organization offering transformative educational programs rooted in cross-cultural dialogue. I’m curious about the ways de-stigmatizing, un-raveling, re-mapping, de-colonizig, and re-negotiating our collective ways of seeing and navigating the world might look like and what what it means to belong and create a more empathetic world through a bottom-up approach. I see this starting with the self, centering collective community, and coming together to amplify the voices of those most impacted by care-full collaboration. I’m interested in how community centered practices humanize, recenter, and renegotiate those on the peripheries as central to collective consciousness and healing, through artistic and educational forms.
I’m interested in creating spaces to contemplate, listen, rest, feel, play, and care as acts of resistance to societal norms that benefit from constant overwhelm, overstimulation, and detachment. This oftentimes manifests as creating constellates of compositions, often contained within four edges as well as facilitating spaces to gather with one another that hold worlds of ambiguous shapes, lived experiences, transparency and opaqueness, painterly colors and textures, individual stories, and perhaps more questions than answers.