Screens No. 3 (2018/2020)
Multimedia
Dimensions vary
A collage of 6 backlight screens built from wood, chicken wire, and artificial aquarium plants. Together, they serve as a homage to the architectural origins of ‘screen.’
Growing up, art never occurred to me as something I could pursue. My mother was a daycare teacher, and my father, a factory man… I hoped to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or maybe an academic… It was not until after the death of my mother, when I was 18, that I began to make work.
My engagement in art stems from my study of anthropology, when I became very interested in the way humans understand each other. Globalization has pushed media into a compressed virtual space where an infinite abundance of digital images and videos live. Traditional ethnography, as a text-based medium, is unequipped to reflect the complexities of the multicultural and modern world. This recognition has led me to utilize both analog and digital art forms as avenues to explore contemporary customs and cultures.
I capitalize upon the chasm between ‘high’ and ‘low’ iconography, the aestheticization of everyday spaces and materials, and projections of identity and reality within social media. My print and video work deal with narratives within popular culture and vise versa, drawing from found social media sources. I use these sources to translate my research into artwork that seeks to describe everyday customs and people. l use found materials, miniatures, natural elements, trinkets, and projections to construct a visual ethnography that captures the fractured narratives of our lives.
I seek to combine research-based methodology with traditional art-making practices; these hybridized forms of experimentation are intended to create new ways of understanding the world around us. My work explores the intricacies of modernity and aesthetics as they intertwine with digital media. I treat my sculptural, projection, and photography work as experimental research that I use to better understand how we deal with screens, images, and space-time relationships.
My practice is for my mother, who loved to create, yet remained tethered to the socioeconomic constraints that prevent so many artists from becoming fully realized. It’s for the underrepresented, working class, from which I come – social workers, bartenders, delivery drivers, factory workers, educators — for whom an artistic practice remains a luxury and a privilege. It is because of you and for you that I make work.
