ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is first and foremost bound by the many ways we seek to protect our selves.

The ideas of perceived protection is revealed in my work in many forms. From meeting the expectations prescribed by our gender roles, to the way we purchase the latest fashions and material objects, so that we too fit in. The way we cleanse our bodies and the surfaces in our homes to free our selves from bacteria and germs. The way we expose of our waste to forget the mess of yesterday. To the ways we feel safe and healthy by the fruits, vegetables, and the dietary supplements that we consume. The act of cleaning is to free that from which obscures or destructs and has become the most dominate metaphor in my work to address the way our society can become obsessively consumed by fear and the ways we strive to protect our selves from harm, either physically or verbally.

Another common thread throughout my work revolves around a place we call home. Home is a place where memories of my most defining and confusing moments growing up as the only girl out of three boys were experienced. Home is a landscape where cultural ideals and expectations of gender roles are defined, learned and put into play. Home is a shelter designed to house our loved ones as well as material objects that we position around us as a way to provide us with a sense of comfort and security. Home is a concept that we refer to that helps ground our definitions of who we are in relation to meeting cultural and societal standards. A concept that is as fantastical as our memories and our perceptions of what this place means to each of us as individuals.

My research exemplifies a form of conditioning that is effortlessly constructed and embedded into the rainbow of visual representations of the ‘self’ that is projected through mass media advertising. The works of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have encouraged me to examine and question the way language is employed by the media and how it constructs a form of dressage and/or training to program idealized notions of social and cultural conditions that dominate one’s perception of self. Ideological domination as presented by a Marxist approach, suggests that those in power have control over the ideas circulated in society. As individuals invest their identity in the demands of social ideology, the power/control relationship of the media is reinforced and strengthened through the obedience of the consumer. For the media defines our wants, needs, and maps out our goals that help us attain social acceptance. Through this research, I believe that if we as a society continue to rely upon the media to determine who we are to be and become, we gradually drift so far from nature, that we willingly abandoned our own natural instincts to determine who we are as unique individuals who can defend and support ourselves without our dependency on the media to guide our way.