Artist Statment

Using vinyl, paper, and paint, my collages, photographs and installations combine appropriated images and phrases from shopping histories, catalogs, and Instagram posts - fusing them into surreal orchestrations that center along the themes of transformation, consumption, and identity. I am examining the ways that images are used to stoke desire for self-improvement and self-indulgence, not only for the objects themselves, but for the identities and lifestyles they represent.

The fantasy of reinvention has been an inextricable part of photographic and California's history. Westward Expansion was encouraged because of the images and promises of California and the lifestyle shifts it represented. Growing up in a suburb of LA country in California, I was surrounded by LA cultural obsession with affluence and flawless appearances. Coming from a middle-class background – we were never poor or rich. Our consumption habits would follow suit, forever striving to be associated with the perceived perfection of wealth, class, and power.

My work is a homage to the kind of living the middle class aspires to while being critical of its aspirational origins. I use materials availible to me - images from my hometown in California, my shopping history, and my travels. Making light of the language of capitalism and reinvention, I lift phrases and images from catalogs, magazines and ads used to describe objects I want to buy to title and use in my work. Mimicking and marrying the slickness of magazine layouts with my own sense of humor, the work directly engages with the willful ignorance of consumption’s impact on the climate and transformative desire of the accumulation of riches. The work is always fighting and acknowledging its own illusion, forever using photography and language to describe and contradict itself.