Artist Statement

My work consists of collaged self-portraits and magazine clippings that illustrate solitude and disassociation. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated my dissociative tendencies and I am grateful to have an art practice that allows me to stay grounded. I make my work in my bedroom where the line between art and my personal experience becomes blurred. I eat, sleep, and make art all in the same place, my floor is littered with magazine clippings, paint, and photographs waiting to be picked up and plastered onto a large piece of paper on my wall.  

My process begins with either one large piece of paper or a mid-size book of pages I have bound together. I create an image on one page before writing a quote or song lyric on another. I am very interested in utilizing photography to reimagine the context in which these found images were taken. Emotive facial expressions appear often in my work, and I often find myself developing a loose narrative as I work through various pages. The result of this process is a large amalgamation of images with high contrast illustrations of movie stills and bold, colorful text throughout.  I am consistently expanding and adding to the narratives that manifest themselves on these pages as I lay down more photographs, paint more portraits, and write thoughts in big bright letters. The final result is a colorful, mixed media story book, and the end result is a bittersweet highlight reel of my daily happenings, internal thoughts and interactions with others. I want my viewers to look at my work the same way they might investigate an old box of photographs—looking for small clues or repeated characters until they come up with a story of their own.