Writings

This is not a proper artist statement. It is a collection of thoughts relating to my work, which I periodically edit.

For the record, I strongly dislike the expectation that there should be artist’s statements, or any kind of explanation of art, unless it is the kind of art that requires specific context to understand - in which case, that text should be considered just as much part of the artwork as its visual components. This is not the case for my work. The viewer should know is that the artist is a white female living in America during the 21st century. Beyond this, I do not want the work to be about me. I want the work to be about itself, and I want the viewer to be free to form their own relationship to the work, and connect their own experiences to it if they feel so inclined. There is no secret code or backstory needed.

At the moment, the most beautiful thing around me is how my headlights light up the bare shrubs and trees and grasses in the dark. The strait ones, the curved ones, and the ones that are growing in the wrong direction. The other most beautiful thing here is the way I see men making contact with one another. Neither of these things will allow me to photograph them. (winter 2024/25)

Volcanos lead to the inside of the Earth. The sky begins around eye level. There isn’t any apocalypse, because there is no such thing as a real beginning or end. Life is always dying and making itself again. (spring 2024)

I thought that there were no ceremonies in this world I am painting and drawing about. But that may be all it is. Even though it is not the kind that always takes itself very seriously. A ceremony is different than performance. It’s a question of sacredness, maybe, and it is a question of whether or not there is an audience, which might also be the difference between nudity and nakedness.

Back in kindergarten, a kid told me, you know, you are naked under your clothes. Well, so is America. I mean America the living thing that is made up of the laboring, and the migrating, and the fighting, and the love making. And the waiting in lines and the driving of cars. The living things that feel and move on its behalf. They have to find ways to live in spaces that are not made for them, as they are making them. These places that were made to be passed through or passed by. Sometimes the living thing grows around the structure, and sometimes she presses against it until one of them breaks. She keeps going.

Try to look at it like a witness. Not the way that an expert looks at the situation. Not the way an audience looks at a show. A witness is not the same as an observer, or anything else that pretends to be outside the world it taking in. A witness is somebody who sees another person naked, remembering that they are naked under their clothes too.

But this here is not really America. This is a made-up place I am making.

In movies, a naked female body that looks one way usually means sex, and naked female body that looks another way usually means horror and other bad things. And those seem to be the main two options. But that is not what I am trying to do. Sometimes people see the implication of violence, disaster, suffering, or decay when they look at my paintings. I did not put that there. I suspect that some people are reading paintings in the language that has been formed by movies and tv, interpreting certain lines of the body, use of color, or the absence of a certain performance of the self as an indication that something terrible is happening. Even when there is no such thing being literally depicted. What seems to be happening is that the images I want to create about living, feeling humanity are running up against a tightly formed visual language that I fundamentally take issue with, and that I would like to destroy. But I don’t have control over the broader culture I am making art in. It will be interesting to see where this conundrum goes, and if there is a way for the work to fuck with these subtle pre-made associations without it having to be about that fact that it is doing that.

Disaster is only one thing that can make a life exist separate from its name. Not all nakedness is victimhood.

And not all choice is freedom, and not all speech is power.

Why should violence have a monopoly on nakedness. The theatrics of forced exposure is empty. The theatrics of opposition. One being revealed, being touched, being fucked, being killed. The affording and denying of status. The text on the museum wall that seems to have no author. This story is not complete. The one with the regular kind of power is not what they say they are, they are only using the other’s nakedness to deny their own. What a disappointment it is, if you were looking for that kind of a drama. When it turns out that everybody living is also dying. And the un-specialness of this. It is not particular to any individual. It’s the most ordinary thing you can do, it just happens in a different way every time.

Ugliness is another a way of being un-curated, un-presented, without name. Ugliness on a screen symbolizes a lack of humanity, or a lack of sanity, or a lack of intelligence, or a lack of depth, or a lack of power, or a lack of kindness, or a lack of joy, or a lack of vitality, or something, but not on a screen, ugliness is just what it is. The absence of a certain kind of outward-facing self. The absence of second layer of skin which has come to be expected, particularly on females.

What if a person just decides not to wear it. What if someone figures that no matter what they do, they are subject to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, even by themselves, and that they are too small for a name, and that they are too big for a name. I don’t have anything to reveal, my guess at what I am is as good as yours. It happens all the time, in the in between seconds, and those are what I am describing.

How would you know to put tourism and migration in such different worlds, and ignore all of those strange things in between? The aesthetics of each one is reflected in the other. Look at how the industries and the infrastructure that support one must suddenly be adapted to support the other, because a political tectonic plate has shifted. Poverty is defined as how much money you have (a dollar and ninety cents) not how much money you need. That doesn’t make any sense.

Sometimes there are giants. Back in kindergarten, a kid told me, you know, bears are really big. How big? Well, they are the size of the whole world. Everybody can be that big sometimes, and other times, you are just a little fragment. But you wouldn’t even know that if you had all the clothes on.

I’ve been told that people are stupid. Maybe part of that is because people will compose a story of almost anything. And they can be incredibly wrong. But you could share a whole world with someone else just by describing a living thing and a place, and a relationship between them. If you can only shed from storytelling the question of validity.

I have been told that people are so smart, they don’t even need an explanation as to why. I hope that you were right about that, Queen of Fakes.

How do you recon with this shiny purple tower. It seems to have no history, no layers, no smell. It is not mentioned in any ballad. It promises to never grow old or fall apart. Falling apart is scary. The tower is scary too. I try not to be afraid of either one, because they are inevitable. It is the dissonance this tower breeds in people that is the real culprit. So I look for proof of something that breathes underneath it. You are standing in the tower. But if you look all the way over there, just down the hill from that highway that has a hole blown in it, there is another tower just like it. Well, it turns out that it isn’t the same tower, and it’s not even purple. But in your mind, it was, just for a minute, just long enough to catch some stranger sister’s breath on your tongue. (late winter 2022)