Artist Statement
How does an artist make art that is relevant in the world today? Although art is never a simple process, the answer to this question has become pretty simple. I make relevant art by using art as a means to talk about relevant social issues in the world. All due respect must be given to the hand that can craft a beautifully rendered figure, or recreate a landscape or still-life with precision and detail. However, for my art, there is a necessity and urgency for some kind of greater purpose than to just make something pretty. Truly meaningful art must come packaged with the desire to incite change and positive growth in one’s community and in the world. I want viewers to reflect upon themselves and begin to question the social constructs that have been built up around us by an unseen power structure. I make my art to create an awareness of oppressions that go unrecognized in mainstream culture, in the hopes that viewers will see, think, and ultimately, to empower themselves and to act.
Over the past two years I had become a bit obsessed with the role that patriarchy had played in my life personally, and ultimately the role I felt it played in dictating norms for women in general, particularly in the area of sexuality. In my series of lithography prints, I played with the idea of power by juxtaposing images that typify the “disempowered woman” on top of call girl ads from the back of the Village Voice. Similarly, in my series of small mixed media collages, I pulled images directly from porn magazines, pairing the pictures with provocative words pulled from mainstream magazines and ads. Just to clarify, the ideas behind my art don’t attempt to vilify porn necessarily. But rather, in our daily barrage of signs and images in popular culture, my art questions our perception of who is being empowered in a patriarchal society, and how subliminal Madonna/Whore dichotomies in mainstream media play a role in this process.
My obsession with patriarchy continues in a series of large-scale black and white self-portraits rendered in acrylic paint on canvas where I have used my body to create a character, as if from a book. My self-portraits are accompanied by my own poetry, unfinished short stories, and journal entries that delve into my own personal struggles with feminine identity and sexuality in the face of patriarchy and gender role double standards. I have continued to appropriate images from advertising and also comic books to discuss the commoditization of the female body. Visually, I tend to dismember the body, take it apart in pieces, repackage it in graphic novel style, and re-represent the body parts as objects for voyeuristic display. My art is undoubtedly inspired by Feminist and Protest Art, and is informed by the work and ideas of such artists as Barbara Kruger, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, and the Guerrilla Girls to name a few.