I have always harbored a love for things that have been abandoned, lost, and let go of; regular life does not intrigue me. My pieces begin with an aesthetic vision brought to life through a collection of obsessively found, intricate materials like antiques with an unquestionably dense history behind them. This accrual includes found dolls, toys, fabrics, furniture pieces, plants, nick knacks, and more. Using such unique items that someone, somewhere felt no use for as resources for my works always feels special. These objects carry a sense of loss, abandonment, vulnerability, tenderness, aggression, and nostalgia. Through my process of creation, I belittle, complicate, and diminish the objects to guide me through all my inquiries and wonders regarding themes such as love and loss, materialism and consumption, and sex and western beauty standards. I then take my collection and assemble them into dense, oversaturated, and eerie installations that morph into cohesive, lovable installations. My love and excitement for these sentimental objects fuel my desire to create the beauty that the world is missing through my work. My usage of found objects and assemblage installations are ideal in expressing my perceptions on beauty, idealism, and escapism.
I approach my pieces by addressing the relationships between the subject and the object, the knower and the knowledge, and the viewer’s impression of beauty as opposed to me, the creator. As the knower, my art serves as a platform for communicating knowledge that we share to the viewer and how we as a collective have been taught to view beauty. A common motif that appears in my pieces is the topic of beauty, specifically of western standard, and the search for the ‘ideal’. I am interested in exploring the origins of beauty, what defines it, and the various notions about it and their causes. I consider these themes by experimenting with combinations of terror and beauty, innocence and danger, and delicacy and harm. In my pieces, these combinations are shown where I, for example, have placed a doll leg in a heart-shaped box or a dagger next to ballet slippers. With each piece I produce, I question the line between the beautiful and the terrorizing or the cuteness and the horror.
It is my desire to document reality through a twisted escapist lens with the goal that people find their own individual meaning and are able to escape their realities as well. The subjects of my objects are usually paradoxical. Since I began creating pieces, my intentions were always to produce something that was beautiful and idealistic, although the viewer may not agree with my definition of beauty. Essentially, our definition of beauty is derived from the things we love and cherish, from the effects of our experiences, or from our human desires. My art is a result of how I have defined beauty, but it may not be beautiful to others.
Overall, my work is generally composed of found materials and objects that are gathered from the material world to lure viewers into a spiritual world, where they can find infinite meanings. The relationship between the objects I use and the subjects I communicate taps into nostalgia, abandonment, anguish, fear, and horror which is what my work radiates to the masses. I use materials like dolls, toys, antiques, candles, Christian iconography, vintage Playboy magazines, and more because it facilitates the publicization of important social dynamics including death, loss, love, sexuality, innocence, and longing. I hope to explore beauty, aesthetic, and object choices and more as I continue to grow as an artist.