Statement

Working across a range of media including glass, metal, textiles, performance and film, my work addresses issues pertaining to interpersonal power dynamics, social conditioning, borders, and labor.

Drawing heavily from personal and familial narratives, my work often examines how we come to define the “self”. Much of my work is comprised of non-figurative portraiture; I’m interested in the mutability of the subject in a portrait, focusing less on rendering the subject’s likeness and more on depicting how they inhabit a space, whether they do or do not share it with someone else, or the dynamics between multiple people. I’m interested in allowing the viewer to superimpose themselves onto the work, the way one would when identifying with a character in a movie or book. Frequently, I incorporate two figures to discuss the dynamics between people or the change one undergoes over a period of time.

Much of my work also centers on dichotomies of interiority/exteriority and public/private space. In a series of punching bags, for example, I was interested in the private practice or “conditioning” that goes into a public “performance”. I saw this as analogous to ways we privately cultivate our public selves through routines or self care. The punching bag in these works functions as a proxy body or a stand-in/surrogate for the self, and are shown with video works such as my father skinning a deer, that allude to personal narratives of self cultivation and development.

More broadly, glass has been central to my work on the border between public and private space. Some of these works have drawn parallels between windows and the touch screens on our phones, and included storefronts or the porch of a home as a kind of membrane or permeable border between an exterior and interior world. In some instances, such as my installation Bodega (2024), the storefront, which featured a series of bilingual neon works, was used to symbolize a threshold between a past and present self, or the change one undergoes as they move through the world