Statement

Gender, race, age, intelligence, marriage. People give meaning to words, and these meanings are often perceived as objective truth. As a result, language isn't neutral: it reflects the society in which it lives, emphasizing certain things while ignoring others. When a nation’s beliefs about power and privilege are accepted as fact, this can have serious social, cultural, and political consequences.

My art practice challenges social and linguistic constructs in the United States through precisely crafted artworks organized into collections. My work covers various topics, materials, and techniques, focusing on social constructs involving race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. I explore how behavior, media, policy, and institutions are utilized as tools of oppression. I aim to educate, rather than define, by disrupting the normative understanding of a subject.

The questions I ask at the beginning of a series are thoroughly researched and inform my choice of medium, materials, and imagery for the work. The subfloor of my living room installation, Superiority Complex, is lined with my family documents, reminding us that our history lives under the floorboards of our lives. In my queer series, Am I that Name?, the stick figures are cast in urethane resin and painted a flat black. The figures are often mistaken for steel, much like gender, when perceived as binary. It's a Girl! is a collection of mixed media works that challenge the purist aesthetic that privileges one set of materials over another. By incorporating materials of lived experience – cookware, appliances, and décor – the work challenges the gender hierarchy that often mirrors the aesthetic hierarchy. 

I live and create on the ancestral lands of the Pokanoket, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Peoples. I assume the responsibility to educate myself on the long and violent legacy of my fore-parents in the colonization of the United States.