About
My research explores how encounters with images and objects catalyze processes of identity formation. These encounters become charged moments where affect pools and overflows, teaching us new understandings of desire, embodiment, and transformation. I collect these moments in a living, personal archive: my emotional support images. I make grid paintings and cast sculpture that are deeply engaged with the conceptual and formal legacies of Minimalism. Through repetition, doubling, and appropriation, I’m interested in processes of abstraction that queer an object’s meaning, signifiers, and environment. The objects I make recast Minimalist repetition, relationality, and monumentality as intimate and reciprocal, allowing me to claim them for a trans-lesbian aesthetics of desire, sensuality, and excess. I draw on my emotional support images to aestheticize the self-mythology that has been central to understanding my own trans womanhood. Whether it's a horse girl who has never ridden a horse, lesbian Strega Nona, or an intimate encounter with a towering trans woman embodied by Richard Serra's sculpture, my self-mythology is conceptually specific, formally cheeky, and a little bit slutty. Using the exhibition as a narrative framework to connect each object within, I stage encounters that mythologize the deeply process-oriented nature of transitioning and how the objects, relationships, and desires we hold dear transition alongside us.
Practice
I am a painter, but if I am being annoying I call myself a conceptual artist. I make grid paintings, cast sculpture, and installation work that ultimately deal with painting problems (i.e. surface, 2D space, color, etc) as a way to conceptualize my experience as a trans woman living in a changing and mediated body.
Currently working on
I'm currently developing a couple of bodies of work and feeling very energized in the studio. One is a series of 6 paintings that synthesize unique grid systems based on the perspective grids of the specific works that they are referencing. I am then taking netting and stretching and sewing it to create this grid, which will in turn be buried under 20 or so layers of paint and wax. This body of work emphasizes the concepts of perspective and pentimento to create a series of transsexual covers or parodies, illustrating the fact that perception is never neutral. The second body of work is my dialogue with monumentality as a trans woman. I'm having a lot of fun imagining things that are existentially large — specifically Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, “Scandoval,” Chicago brickwork, and Minimalist sculpture — as looming trans girls themselves, learning to delicately assert themselves in the world. The centerpiece of this body of work is a replica of a section of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc made out of cast beeswax bricks. The facade will be supported by 2x4 construction framing, allowing the sculpture to read as a painting with a front (bricks) and a back (wood framing). Following the work of Tom Burr, I am interested in further breaking apart Serra’s infamous sculpture into roughly 555 bricks, appropriating the original Tilted Arc’s obstructiveness to create an intimate “viewing room” for a series of small paintings. This body of work collages pop culture and art historical references to conceptualize the looming feeling of being a 6’ tall trans woman and suggests the potential for warmth and care in the shadow of something as big and imposing as Serra’s sculpture. I'm interested in what happens when this affective queerness intersects with Minimalism's formal and conceptual rigidity, and how this intervention proposes a new trans monumentality that is embodied, welcoming, and fluid.
Inspiration
Art history -- specifically Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, midcentury formalism, and Conceptualism -- pop culture, being a dyke, being a trans woman, and mashing together the deeply funny with the deeply serious :)
Upcoming shows & projects
Stay tuned :)
Favorite spot in Chicago
My favorite burger and go to studio lunch break spot is Odge's on Damen in West Town
