New Work coming soon!
Im.mortal captures life with chronic illness. After living with a brain tumor for the last 7 years I wanted to tell the stories of woman and members of the lgbtq+ community who have lived through similar experiences. These portraits redefine what chronic illness looks like. I asked each person to select a photograph of themselves for me to paint, allowing my friends to have control over the way they were portrayed. I controlled the mood, color, and shapes to create portraits that balanced the familiar against the foreign.
This work is influenced by my interest in the inevitability of death. Chronic illness brings mortality to the forefront of existence. It is the most reliable human experience and unites all.
Film Stills of various performance pieces. Each performance is a response to me dealing with being bipolar and having a psychotic break.
Phases of Vitality is about living with a brain tumor (cavernous malformation). I have been through various surgeries, including an installation of a shunt, strabismus, and removal of two tumors. This work looks beyond the factual events and channels the progression of self in the spotlight of a personal trauma. After not having issues with the tumor for a couple years, I decided to paint from photos I had taken at various stages of my illness. I projected my emotional state at each phase into the images. Color was used for an emphatic effect.
My work is influenced by Carl Jung’s theories, particularly, his theory of the “Shadow Self”. Jung’s “Shadow” is an elusive part of ego that one cannot always recognize in oneself. These self-portraits are my expedition to find the white rabbit.
This work is about femininity and coming of age narratives within the middle class in New England and Southern California. The work consists of photographic portraiture and video of girls and young women from the ages of 8 to 25. All of them are performing someone’s expectation of their femininity. My interest is in the instability of these performances.
Various writings influenced this body of work, such as Anne Sexton’s book of fractured fairy tales, Transformations, featured a soap opera revision of tales like Cinderella and Snow White dealing with contemporary issues. In Judith butler’s piece performative acts and gender constitutions, she states, “….to be women to have to become women to compel the body to have to conform to a historical idea of women to induce the body to become a cultural sign.
