Ugly Convention

I am interested in the overt and covert ways power works in social (familial, sexual, economic, racial and cultural) relations.

Using imagery from mass culture and advertising, I make collage/assemblage pieces inspired and informed by Pop, Socialist Realism, and Situationist experiments in “detournément (detouring).”

I de-contextualize popular/populist collage elements (pornography, corporate/human resources/consumer imagery) in arenas that embody themes of authoritarian repression and mass alienation visualized through a combination of office supply media (China markers, gel pens, Sharpies, adhesive tape, and layered inkjet prints) with studio art practices (painting, life drawing). The resulting frisson of imagery introduces a visual dialectic that has a goal of up-ending conventional “bourgeois” cultural wisdom.

Artists who have had a major influence on me include Sigmar Polke, Jim Shaw, and David Wojnarowicz,

Through my body of work, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, photography, digital graphics, and installation, I hope to inspire others to subject man made visual-cultural reality to a thoroughgoing inquiry via a socialist-feminist critique of the extant visual environment.