Artist Statement

I am most interested in questions of love, lust, loss, and desire, especially the feelings that we secretly harbor for one another. My work explores these ideas through personal and collective memories, actual and constructed experiences, and tangling and untangling the very loose threads that connect us.
I often employ found objects and appropriated images and texts, which are preloaded with history and meaning, in addition to my original material. I see this as a form of cultural shorthand toward my personal visual vocabulary, an attempt to communicate with others while filling in the blanks of memory and persona. I reproduce and manipulate these pre-existing objects and images through assemblage, collage, re-photography, hand-sewing, mold-making and casting, and other means.
Temporality is very important to me, not only because of my work with film and video, which inherently deal with time, but in the pursuit of making fleeting thoughts, emotions, and smells more concrete than they are in the performance of our lives. The inclusion of religious and popular iconography in my work takes into account these parallel forms of worship while aiming at a larger sense of function and design. Through the construction of self-portraits, personal landmarks, and mash notes to an unfulfilled American Dream, I am self-mythologizing, while exploring objects and actions that might seem remarkably unremarkable on their own.