Artist Statement
My visual art encompasses an interdisciplinary practice of drawing, installation, and time-based media (video, sound-manipulation, and performative experience). Through these forms, I explore the emotional themes of fear, acceptance, and hope as they relate to issues of conflict, from the international scale of war to the more personal level of family and one’s relationship to one’s own body.
My intuitive sense is to create work that is deeply layered, in meaning and in form. Using text and imagery, the work is a complex composite of layered media. The layers work to reveal as well as obscure meaning. The work represented here is a response to that tendency. In some cases, I have chosen to continue building my work through layering. But more often, in this recent work, I have chosen to embrace more simplistic approaches. While my work is clearly not minimalistic, the pieces represented here seek to convey their message with a clarity and purpose I am working to strengthen and solidify.
In my most recent piece, Dearest, I wanted to really challenge myself. I worked hard to infuse the entire piece in a simplicity that is not often my modus operandi. I worried that the piece would be boring, and that I would have trouble retaining the audience’s attention. What I found, however, was that with only a few layers for the audience to decipher and by maintaining an intent focus on what I was doing as the performer (drawing), I created a piece that was meditative and intimate, a piece that welcomed audience members into the private, vulnerable space of my studio and my journal. As I drew images culled from months of researching nuclear war and testing, nuclear power, and the effects of nuclear radiation, seven letters were read aloud by audience members. When a letter was finished, I would interrupt my drawing-space to seek out another person to read the next one. The seven letters were to friends, family, and strangers. The content of the letters was also informed by my research, but in addition, they were instilled with personal stories from my journal, responses to recent news reports (from the disaster in Fukushima to the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, London, Madrid, and elsewhere), and anecdotes about the specific relationship of myself to the receiver. A narrative began to emerge from the letters and the drawings that detailed my own struggle to find hope in a world so fraught with destruction.