Artist Statement
I celebrate life’s oddities with a focus on femininity and parenthood. In these scenes, fantasy and obligation charge and bind domestic environments giving memories new form. Restless bodies at play pile up in dreamy, hallucinogenic landscapes. Wet into wet oil marks tie the forms together as the figures' awkward limbs poke out of the pile to assert autonomy. Bodies are propped up by each other, but they imprison each other too. Dizzying banality teases out a bit of magic but reminds us that happiness comes at a price. Airbrushed acrylic objects and symbols add mood, formal noise, and illustrate what I think of as “mother-brain”: a distracted state of constant list making wherein one has the feeling of being “weeded” or unable to perform all tasks necessary to uphold a properly functioning life. Paint veils, drips, and splashes accentuate the supernatural aura as the paintings shudder with a pulsing, nervous energy. There is uncertainty in the scene. Objects bleed into and become one another as background objects are brought forward through space and foreground objects are pushed back. I show psychic tension by restructuring space and time. A scene of multiple still images is condensed, out of the usual order of time, into one image, one moment. Unable to decide which moment is paramount, the group of stills are given equal importance and challenge each other for dominance. I use anxious mark making and warped perspective to mirror a rushing world distorted by apprehension. These paintings underscore the inherent emotional conflict of parenting young children, the difficulty of decision making in a time of excessive information, and the fragility of comfort and happiness in America today.
