My work is bound to intense colors, awkward and surprising forms and idiosyncratic compositions. I utilize printmaking techniques, as well as drawing and painting, to convey spaces that are simultaneously intriguing and frightening. Explorations into the grand forces that propel the world, good and evil and drama arose from my early love of John Steinbeck and the Old Testament. My fascination with the melodrama of narrative led to pop culture obsessions with Law and Order and Mariah Carey. Instead of expressing these interests through traditional narrative structure, I create wildly shifting plots through intense and often very wrong-feeling color choices. Color is my most prized tool that betrays my urgent emotions when making. Interest in mood, emotion and chaos arose from my attempts to understand the completely paradoxical nature of the world. How is it possible that I can love and hate the same thing simultaneously? How can I be so good and so bad? Why do I want something and then try to tear it apart? I harness forces of good and evil, beauty and repulsiveness, happiness and sadness, attraction and repulsion, in order to convey scenes as tumultuous as both the world around me and my own shifting moods. I portray this shift through cropping imagery, color or medium shifts, and scale changes. By pushing two opposite elements next to each other I hope to reveal how disparate energies cohabit the same plane. These disruptions are meant to take the work to an unpredictable conclusion while confounding the viewer. I want people to question whether they are still having fun, or if things have taken an irreversible dark turn.
Bright colors and silly bulbous forms serve as a counterpoint to the gloom and doom of the world. I also see my devotion to unapologetic color and uncomfortable compositional choices as a feminist choice. In a society where women, including myself, are often told that we are “too much” or “overly emotional”, I seek to wade directly into these characterizations and revel in them. I have always been attracted to the gaudy, ornamental and decorative. This attraction can be traced to my mother’s tastes. In our household mixing patterns was commonplace and my mother willfully ignored choosing a standard palette. In David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, he describes Western society’s aversion to color, “If colour is a cosmetic, it is also—and again—coded as feminine. Colour is a supplement, but it is also, potentially, a seduction” (52). I seek to wade into these negative connotations. I like the idea of color being a cheap trick, simply artifice and ornament. I think of each drawing as being completely made up of decoration, but somehow the interactions between these moments of visual seduction create a larger and more complex story. Every piece is a moment in time illuminating complex interactions that exist in the unpredictable and illogical world of the paper.