Current Artist Statement:
I begin my painting process by sourcing images of Playboy models, professional cheerleaders, Sports Illustrated models, and other images of iconic, ‘conventionally beautiful’ young women from American culture. My interest in these images comes from a place of conflict. When I source these materials in my research, I feel a longing to look like these women. I want to possess a beauty that is permanent, unchanging, airbrushed, and flawless. I want to be wanted. But I do not want to be an object of desire, because I do not want to be an object. I resist assigning value to my body, youth, or appearance based on an arbitrary, impalpable ideal. Painting from these images allows me to confront my complex relationship to these women. I deconstruct and rearrange several source images at a time, pulling them apart and smashing them together to create a new body that is elusive, disorienting, and indecipherable.
Through scribbling, blurring, and smearing with paint, I transform the original images into a hybrid being that is impossible to pin down and consume whole. There is struggle and violence inherent to the impossibility of these invented bodies, suggesting my conflicting desires to both appreciate and obliterate, to seduce and repulse. As I make this work, I relate my experiences as a competitive dancer and gymnast to the experience of womanhood. I contend with the notion that performers, and more broadly, women, should make the impossible look effortless, all while under the guise of fake tans, big hair, and false eyelashes.While I allow the body to be disrupted and reconstructed, I often render the faces in instructable detail. They seduce the viewer with a cool, distant gaze, projecting stability and confidence through a glitching and pulsating kaleidoscope of body parts, shoes, and accessories.
Through their confrontational stare, they challenge the viewer to confront their expectations of woman as hyper-feminized sex object. Like an animal deceived into swallowing a poisonous prey, the viewer may identify pink bikinis and mini-skirts that signal a knowable beauty, but that do not amount to a knowable whole. Therefore, though the jumbled body expresses chaos and tension, it simultaneously manifests liberation. Through the act of painting, I overhaul the stasis of the impenetrable, air-brushed body to create something that defies expectation. While the original images are deliberately staged for consumption, my paintings are indigestible in a single glance. They ask the viewer to slow down and contend with the formulaic conventions that signify a body worthy of lust and desire in American culture .
In making this work, I grapple with my own experiences navigating the freedoms and limitations of beauty. Making these paintings enables me to negotiate the power in expressing my own femininity and sexuality, and the vulnerability of being flattened into an object, consumed for pleasure and entertainment. As I paint, these women become me, and I become them. We merge and meld together into something that is part mirage and part reality, part reflection and part distortion. I use painting to wrestle with them and with myself, fighting to liberate my body from objectification, while also insisting that I am entitled to celebrate my body and feel desired.