Artist Statement
From a young age, I have been entranced with the mystical and foreign aspects of creatures, aesthetics, and human nature. By the same token, I explore the dark and macabre of human experience. As a queer, non-binary artist that spent years denying and quieting their struggle with identity and mental illness, I wish to reveal those faces, my face, through my work. I challenge viewers to consider the ways in which they have been conditioned to believe concepts of gender, mental health, lifestyle, and individuality. The consideration of gender vs. sex-expression norms, as well as society’s push back to the unknown, is also on display.
Additionally, I encourage viewers to appreciate their unique ability to perceive aesthetic beauty through ways of color, detail, texture, and composition – a uniquely human trait. I find the visual entrancement of my pieces equally as important as the ways in which they confront viewers’ comfort, ethics, and morals. I strive to convey empathy, immersion, individuality, and critical-thinking.
The more we, as a society, stop to think about our own actions, thoughts, and accountability, the more easily we can live in cohesion and thoughtfulness.
Like many artists across the world, the 2020 crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic caused me to lose my job, re-situate living situations, and most unfortunately, up-rooted my senior college experience. In the blink of an eye, there was no more graduation or exhibition to feature the work I’d been dedicating nearly 5 years to. The modifications necessary for my work to function in an online environment were curated over many painstaking nights. Illustration has always been my primary medium of communication and expression, which now needed to be worked into this sort of false, non-tangible or textured territory. I began to pull in other elements I’ve spent a considerable amount of time dabbling in- photography, 3-D components, and so forth. Thus, in creating a body of illustrations that questions and challenges the viewer’s construction of gender, sexuality, and learned cultural-norms, I found myself becoming my thesis. After all, my work is narrated after my own story. While illustrating and framing my pieces was apart of the original plan, I spent concerted time daydreaming on how I could communicate their meaning atop the photograph’s furthered implication. I took the most literal course of action and interacted with my pieces, I myself became the subject that I am depicting throughout my drawings. Perhaps most rewarding of this unprecedented and unforeseen circumstance came my new comprehension of mediums, my own narrative, and a new dimension to take my work after graduation.
