In This Exhibition
Past Works
As someone who has struggled nearly her entire life with body image and feeling feminine as a “plus-sized” (code name for fat) girl, the road to self-acceptance has always been bumpy, distressing, and complicated. As a result of a deeply-rooted need to iron out these unresolved emotions, my current work focuses on fat acceptance and femininity while also being an attempt to remedy a lifelong battle with self-hatred and internalized fatphobia. Additionally, after realizing that much of the artwork I was consuming and producing failed to be size inclusive, it became more important than ever for me to create work that I could visually identify with; consequently, my more recent work includes either myself or other larger women as the subject.
Inspired by Pop Art, Takashi Murakami’s self-coined “Superflatism,” and digital art, my goal for my recent paintings is to use bodily elements as a means to explore self-perception, anti-fat bias, and my own lived experiences dealing with oftentimes debilitating body dysmorphia. Having always been taken by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol’s use of bold colors and flat compositions, I use colorful, solid blocks of paint in my art as a way to emphasize the messages I want to convey. Furthermore, my prior experience with computer art informs the way I approach the composition of each piece I make. In addition to doing graphic design work in the past, I used a digital painting software for a body of work about the villainization of women in folklore and mythology. With the help of these experiences, I can compose and paint in ways that emphasize the graphic nature of a piece; the repetition of images, the black outlines of each object, and the rounded, clean-cut brush strokes allude to digital art and the easy manipulation of the image. Using these methods, I hope to marry digital and traditional art in a way that becomes uniquely my own.
Through my paintings, I aim to spotlight issues related to body image and create conversation about the emotional distress many plus-sized women experience due to societal pressures and our own sense of self worth. There is always work to be done in terms of destigmatizing fatness, and my art is one of the ways I hope to contribute to that change.