Detail from Color of the Year, 2012.

Detail from Color of the Year, 2012.

My work develops in response to current events, consumer culture, and contemporary theories on psychology and cognitive development.  As a culture, we are confronting so much all at once, in a world saturated with information and sky-high levels of stress.  I make work that develops in response to culturally relevant external struggles, while using my own experiences and psychological lens as a point of reference.  The psychological side of my work serves as a way of seeing national and world events, grounding them in a human perspective and ultimately opening up a space for questioning and dialogue.  

 

Departing from personal narratives yet engaged with larger cultural issues, the works in my portfolio offer reflections on a variety of topics.  I have completed projects while researching the relationship between abstraction and representation; expressions of anxiety and obsessive thinking; contemporary feminism and American advertising; and the economic recession of 2008 and shifting definitions of the American Dream, among others.  Though my interests are varied, I find that I almost always come back to the relationship between exterior complication and interior stress; my own life and psychology within an environment that can be playful, colorful, stressful, fractured, and confusing - sometimes all at once.

 

The visual language I utilize in my work often references colors, images, and motifs from consumer culture.  I view these references as a grounding point, establishing that the dialogues I wish to construct are specifically relevant to contemporary times.  The bright colors we see in commercials and Internet advertisements are typically the package in which stressful events are delivered to us, and my work comments on the strange relationship between this bright, almost playful language and the more serious topics they often share space with.  I wish to facilitate a conversation on more difficult topics while using a language that draws people in, feeling foreign yet vaguely familiar.  Even in my most abstract works, the color palette points outside to a world of ads, commercials, retail environments, and consumer objects - accumulations and piles of things, chaotic and cluttered, falling down or spilling out, repeated.