Artist’s Statement

Making sense of the world doesn’t matter to me; The fact that it doesn’t make sense is an
artistic freedom in itself. It means my art doesn’t have to make sense either. But it can have
recurring themes, such as beauty, time, frustration, paranoia and mental illness. I enjoy distorting
and bringing attention to the distortion, or things that appear to be something they are not.
Sometimes I feel paranoid. Other times I feel the frustrating weight of mental illness holding me
down. But it doesn’t hold unto me for long without art uplifting my spirits.
Oh post-WWII, how perfect life in the suburbs was! The immaculate houses and lawns
hid many things. It is frustrating that sexism, among other things, still exists! It is infuriating that
the 1950s and 1960s looked so perfect from old magazines. But it was, and still is, all a lie from
a distorted reality. I use National Geographic magazines from midcentury America, because I
like cutting out these frustrating lies, and protesting with them. For my painting, “Meaningless
Scramble,” I cut out pictures of Indian women, pistols, and a Kitchen-Aid advertisement, all
from a 1967 magazine. Of course, I armed the women with the pistols to shoot those sexist ads
into a labyrinth of swirled oil paint. I like to use techniques like mark-making, which can be
messy. And I am okay with that because I am not afraid of my pictures being beaten with an ugly
stick. I am proud of the ugliness.