artist statement
I am a visual listener and storyteller.
Understanding the notion of storytelling as an act with two opposing directions that can be interwoven to tap into the gloriously messy contradictions, cognitive dissonance, joys, lamentations, and experiences of the expansive, varying human experience. Defined as both an act of truth telling, uncovering what has been lost and the process of “making up: (sometimes absurd, off center) narratives through imaginative, inventive play.
My work shifts between artistic interventions of making lived experiences visual, exploring the intersections of mapping, language, physical, cultural, and sociopolitical landscape, geography, collective memory and identity as well as visual meeting points of the body, mind, and memory/cultural/sociopolitical/physical landscape through abstraction. My work also spans various media including drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, installations, audio/visual, photo/film to question the uses, interpretations, and appropriations of borders, boundaries, shifting, perception(s) vs reality/ies, the space between what is real and imagined, what is historicized, memorialized, ignored, valued, tolerated, oppressed, commemorated, remembered, and forgotten.
I aim to tread and reside in the uncomfy liminal space of creating an environment conducive for active listening that feels safe enough (safety as defined and understood as not a fully achievable concept or experience) to reside in acute discomfort. This is a magical dimension where unfiltered vulnerability can cultivate trust overtime, creating meaningful connection and transformative (un)learning in hopes of restoring long-term mending. This oftentimes manifests as creating constellates of compositions, often contained within four edges, that hold worlds of ambiguous shapes, lived experiences, transparency and opaqueness, painterly colors and textures, individual stories, and hazy memories.
My artistic research also encapsulates a social practice. Whether it be through the lens and practice of transnational cross-cultural exchange; curating spaces to gather and come together across areas of difference to take part in pluralistic dialogue; interpretive mapping and data collection resulting in artistic interventions and reinventions; academic research exploring topics such as intersections of cultural (dissonant) heritage, public space, artistic freedom of expression, collective memory/identity; facilitating workshops aimed at community building across art, culture, and education, my aim is to facilitate opportunities for meaningful and unexpected intersection. Creating space to contemplate, listen, feel, play, and care as acts of resistance to a societal norms of constant overwhelm, overstimulation, and detachment — and perhaps pose more questions than answers.
To de-stigmatize, un-ravel, re-map, de-colonize, and re-negotiate our collective understandings of what it means to belong and create a more empathetic world through a bottom-up approach, starting with the self, rippling into one’s own corner of the world up through layers of community to humanizing, recentering, and renegotiating those on the peripheries as central to collective consciousness and healing, through artistic and educational forms.
….Dreaming is a form of planning. Gloria Steinman.