The figure is integral to storytelling traditions. The dominance of anthropocentricity in literature and painting inform a collective imagination on how to effectively and compellingly chronicle fiction and non-fiction narratives. From ancient cave paintings, to contemporary art and writing, figures are vehicles for depicting and deciphering epochs, morals, conflicts, and surroundings. There is a consistent impulse for people to create and witness reflections of themselves, as well as escape into alternate realities, to form connection and understanding of the self and the other.

 

I am investigating specific figurative tropes. The figures in my work exist somewhere between my body, storied ingénues, and classical nudes: idyllic Fauves, toned Greco-Roman sculptures, languid Odalisques, and preposterously proportioned Pin-Ups. My contention with the “reclining nude” and “bather" is the appeal of her lethargy, moreover, her performance of relaxation and distress versus the reality. Reinterpreting and repeating iterations of these figures is emblematic of my complicated relationship to western culture and media: over-saturated by my close-but-never-close-enough likeness to pitied, yet desired, women in paintings, myths, fairy tales, films and advertisements. Born and raised in Los Angeles, my surroundings were inundated with this visual language in billboards, television, murals and museums. I am curious as to the effects of that overexposure, and how this tradition of the female figure as passive, yet central, has shaped my expectations of art, femininity, health, and sexuality.

 

Painting, printmaking, and drawing are the central focus of my practice, though I occasionally explore an expanded definition of these mediums into mixed-media sculpture, animation and collage. Using layers of high contrast colors and bold line work, I illustrate vignettes of unease and yearning. Recurring melancholic props such as tissue boxes, fires, animals, spilling messes of wax, blood, tears, and fruit further inform these dramatic scenes. Both the imagery and the act of painting, printmaking, or drawing, the method and ritual of it, imbue metaphorical and thematic significance to the work. I reveal aspects of the process in my work to give it a sense of duration while remaining in a fixed state or loop. The innate stillness speaks to the fatigue of feeling overwhelmed and the problems of inertia in times that desperately call for action.