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Over the last few years, my work has become about the space that exists between what we can roughly describe as the "outside world" and the "inside world"; the space that comes to define who we are in a thousand tiny ways, some conscious and some not. It has become a process of me thinking aloud as I try and figure out how I've become the person that I am and as I try and understand my relationship to others and the world around me. I use the image of the industrious little girl (in many cases, several in a single drawing) to be a surrogate for myself and see my work to be, in many ways, an exercise in self-portraiture. I play with the tension between the sweet images, pretty girls, simple palette, and the honest and (I hope) fearless conversations they have as a way of both exploring femininity as a broad concept, and also my internal life in particular.
My ass is perpetually kicked (and I am constantly inspired) by the work of artists who also responded to living in violent, and (at least when it comes to the political situation they were responding to) morally bankrupt times by reconciling the image of the body and of the self uneasily (to put it mildly): Joseph Beuys, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hans Bellmer, Francesca Woodman, Chris Burden, Kathe Kollwitz, and the Dadaist artists in general.
-- June 2007
The following is from a statement I wrote for a body of work which was produced in 2004-2006:
My paintings and drawings employ texts from both left- and right-leaning political sources along with selections from my journal entries, which are fused together to create an ongoing narrative. This text is then interspersed with a backdrop of images cribbed from political and daily newspaper cartoons of the 1800s and early 1900s, as well as allusions to the work of Henry Darger.
Although only the most engaged viewers are likely to read these long texts closely, they are meant to reveal the limitations and possibilities of such hard-line, reductive thought, to show the complex similarities that exist in supposedly diametrically opposed lines of reasoning. Skimming the texts-the approach favored by most viewers-gives one a sense similar to that experienced while watching the TV news: Words float by, a few notable names or phrases stick in one's head, and the opinions that viewers start with are confirmed by what they believe they've seen. It's not an unusual occurrence for my work to be interpreted as pro-something or anti-something-the same work interpreted in two different ways by viewers who haven't actually read the text-when a close reading of the pieces makes clear that I set forth no such easy conclusions (at least not with such simplicity). Rather, I strive to give equal time and voice to as many political views as possible while also interjecting my own, using my work to lay out each argument as it comes in, ushering each one to its own logical conclusion.
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