Artistically, I am a storyteller. I focus on personal expression and the translation of ideas through an interdisciplinary attitude and I use the creative process to study cultural ideas. My aggressive approach towards my work helps me to bring my personality and my attitude into the commentaries I create and I can more personally narrate, satirize, question, and comment on aspects of my physical and psychological environment. By manipulating contents and contexts, each piece becomes an abstraction of things we know, see, and understand as a society and tells of our contemporary culture through my own search for meaning. Through my installation work, I can introduce, incorporate, and recombine a multitude of ideas as expressed through images, objects and materials. This gives me a platform to tell stories of my own relationship with time and place, politics, religion, class, gender roles, personal relationships and other aspects of how I fit into the world around me.
With an understanding of material culture, I work with objects and images as a means of translating ideas, values, and meanings. My attraction to objects is due to their inherent or attached connection to culture and I enjoy drawing the viewer in when the elements are recognizable and familiar. Photographic images, on the other hand, have always been of interest to me because of their power to convey information and to work as cultural objects in themselves. I use materials in this manner because they can relate insights into our culture or society that cannot be expressed through verbal or written languages and I feel this practice helps to draw the viewer in to the work so they can interact with the work in a personal way and decipher some of the latent meanings buried within each story.
Throughout my career I have maintained an interdisciplinary attitude towards my work and have utilized a variety of media to relate my stories. This approach allows me use a diverse and eclectic visual vocabulary in the creation of work that explores the intellectual and aesthetic potential of objects and images. The ultimate goal of my creative activity is to reflect on the world around me and to divulge my connection to my own environment.
