ARTIST STATEMENT:
At the age of seven, pop music and societal customs had already greatly influenced me. As songs played on the car radio, I would gaze out the window and the lyrics would transform me into the protagonist who searched for love, found love, or recovered from a wounded heart. At that time, I had little exposure to popular culture, but I was inadvertently aware of how the plot of a music video unfolds. I knew how to accessorize like Madonna, a woman I never heard of. I also knew how to mimic emotional and physical expressions of romantic love; feelings at the time I never experienced.
A process of looking back causes me to recognize the individual and the collective experience. My own memories are distorted by cultural myth and my expectations have been reinforced by the Hollywood version. I see the collective experience working in an orchestral fashion. The extended reality of broadcast media, advertisement, movies, legends and social standards become instruments that create the symphony of discovering self.
My photographic and video work explores the disjunction between expectations and reality for women in early adulthood. Using myself, my own encounters and the ideas I have of human understanding; my artwork shows the conflict, the thin line where the collective cultural expectations are impossible to separate from the self.
I utilize styles that refer to popular culture, fashion and music videos to address the conflicting state of modern living. Popular iconographies such as stickers and candy are used as symbols for emotions, expectations and consumption. In my more recent work, Emoticons, electronics are used as transmitters of emotions and escapism. Each work searches out a personal conflict between ones identity and expectations, both imagined and real. They all conclude with feelings of vulnerability and isolation, which infuse society today.
Unlike my predecessors, these image portrayals appear as natural aesthetic expressions of a woman’s anxieties. The goal is to unite one's anticipations of relationships, belief systems, surroundings, and identity with the reality of life and do it on an emotional and cognitive level.
At the age of seven, pop music and societal customs had already greatly influenced me. As songs played on the car radio, I would gaze out the window and the lyrics would transform me into the protagonist who searched for love, found love, or recovered from a wounded heart. At that time, I had little exposure to popular culture, but I was inadvertently aware of how the plot of a music video unfolds. I knew how to accessorize like Madonna, a woman I never heard of. I also knew how to mimic emotional and physical expressions of romantic love; feelings at the time I never experienced.
A process of looking back causes me to recognize the individual and the collective experience. My own memories are distorted by cultural myth and my expectations have been reinforced by the Hollywood version. I see the collective experience working in an orchestral fashion. The extended reality of broadcast media, advertisement, movies, legends and social standards become instruments that create the symphony of discovering self.
My photographic and video work explores the disjunction between expectations and reality for women in early adulthood. Using myself, my own encounters and the ideas I have of human understanding; my artwork shows the conflict, the thin line where the collective cultural expectations are impossible to separate from the self.
I utilize styles that refer to popular culture, fashion and music videos to address the conflicting state of modern living. Popular iconographies such as stickers and candy are used as symbols for emotions, expectations and consumption. In my more recent work, Emoticons, electronics are used as transmitters of emotions and escapism. Each work searches out a personal conflict between ones identity and expectations, both imagined and real. They all conclude with feelings of vulnerability and isolation, which infuse society today.
Unlike my predecessors, these image portrayals appear as natural aesthetic expressions of a woman’s anxieties. The goal is to unite one's anticipations of relationships, belief systems, surroundings, and identity with the reality of life and do it on an emotional and cognitive level.
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