Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2022
My work exists in a crux of absurdity, sincerity, and humor that reveals the complex way we are defined or perceived through the norms and cultural constructs that pervade our social environments. I research these standards in order to understand the societal sense of obligation to fulfill the expectations within. Through exaggeration, contradiction, and or recontextualization I dissect the legitimacy of the symbols that endorse these beliefs and imagine circumstances that disrupt their original intention or history. Addressing issues like privilege, relationships, masculinity, and sexuality, the work both perpetuates and challenges the language and images of such coded environments by highlighting the consequences that arise when these elements converge. The visual language of my work is informed through an inundation of pop culture, kitsch, ‘masculine’ aesthetics and simulated realities. By fragmenting and contrasting the formal devices of my work this suggests that the parameters of these systems are unfixed and subject to change. The work encompasses sculpture and installation by employing multiple components like object fabrication, assemblage, painting, photography, and sound.