STATEMENT 1
I investigate issues engaging social justice and activism, with a recurrent emphasis on how corporations, social institutions, media and popular culture impact everyday lives. Through projects intended to inspire change by heightening public awareness and provoking personal responses, I embrace themes of human interactivity, myth and ritual. Utilizing methods such as repurposing, recontextualizing and détournement, I explore the complex relationship of art, technology, and global culture.
In Oil Change — an interactive multimedia installation — using symbols such as gas nozzles, pumps, oil, water, feathers, yams, beans, soil, bones, hair…, oil politics is brought to the forefront by shedding light on Niger Delta communities where oil companies rake in billions in profits while degrading the environment & exploiting indigenous people with impunity.
The Status of Women project, is a play on ideas questioning how far women have come in the 21st century — the real condition of women in contemporary society — and what women choose to post as status messages on their Facebook “walls.” By showcasing profiles of ten diverse women artists from my Facebook Los Angeles network, along with their bras, it investigates intersections of culture, art and technology as well as notions of class, territory and access.
My current endeavor will feature work inspired by fashion advertising. The project deals with issues of race, femininity and (mis)representation and will include large-scale collages of magazine covers/advertising, painting, photography, video and performance.
STATEMENT 2
“This thing” – The Exile’s Language.
I am an exile – that sometimes listless nomad stuck in a land without a name, a place that seems strange yet familiar, where fear and possibility perform an age-old dance choreographed by the living and the dead, where silence and sound compete, darkness and light blend into gradual noncommittal shades of gray, a land where black and white hold their place, each seemingly oblivious to the reality that one exists only on account of the other.
In this interstice of knowledge and doubt, “this thing” that some call art is the only language we understand, weaving breath into inspiration, tugging, dragging, compelling, flirting, denying, cooling, heating, drawing, erasing, attracting and repelling all at once. And even in sleep, translating into dreams of water, oil, coffee, sugar, diamonds and gold. This language, not the alluring song of river goddesses, nor the discordant ramblings of an insane mind, is influenced by institutions – schools, psychoanalysts, governments, corporations and religions competing for its spirit, laying claim to its cadence, accents, timbre and inflections, and to its very soul. But with “this thing” the exile self-educates, self-medicates and meditates, hoping to wrest the reigns of destiny from clawing, greedy, controlling hands and flowing into the realm where wondering spirits wander towards knowledge – in search of a tribe of like minds.
With “this thing,” stories are shared, experiences related, self recognized in other and other in self. We are in the end – in one form or another – all exiles. And so, as the curious exile sees her reflection, she is aware that it mirrors her spirit and the spirits of beings she has met and experienced on her travels, and with “this thing,” – this compelling thing – the exile observes, directs, demands and questions – blowing breath into bigger breath , hoping to inspire future architects of spheres that cannot be circumscribed, boxed and categorized into black, white and gray boxes.
The exile surveys this landscape of potential, humbled by the knowledge that “this thing,” these words, this language has the power to build, to sustain or to destroy; that without it there would be nothing beyond nothing.
