Artist Statement
Pitting Motherhood vs. Modernism in ebullient museum misadventures is the slapstick showdown at the core of my work. Sucking viewers into a matrix of contradictions, my paintings and drawings entangle the violence of the institutions and art history with the lives of artists. A Sol Lewitt sculpture narrowly avoids a young girl’s projectile vomit, a mother struggles to interpret the severed head of Holofernes for her curious toddler, and a Morris Louis stain-painting masterpiece threatens to absorb and consume a giddy Brownie Troop. Partitions between the body and abstraction are dismantled as figures in my paintings merge and emerge from artworks depicted hanging in museums.
While unfettered children get the run of the museum, their mothers are preoccupied with how to explain (and whether to rationalize) the violence, hypocrisy and sexism in both historical and contemporary artworks, their discourses and exhibition spaces. Employing physical comedy, horror-movie tropes and comic-book action, these self-possessed paintings and drawings merge form and meaning to create visual and narrative complexities that unravel Modernism’s comfortable notions of universality.
