I live in fear of mediocrity. My mom, a teacher for twenty plus years, always preached we live in an age of mediocrity. Instilled from childhood was a desire to be anything but average, or more accurately a fear for the alternative. But I live an average life. I am of average stature and all the adjectives that can imply. My vanillaness always placed me in the majority, always grouped me in the collective void. Due to finding my own personal narrative rather dull I am more interested in the larger picture than tales of individuals. The word generic can often be the critical one used to describe these scenarios but I believe that is the simple and ignorant way to categorize. Generalizations are always derived from specific histories. People talk about art as a way to make the personal universal; but why not go straight to the universal since people already have an impossible time separating their baggage.

I chose to work in the tradition of painting long before receiving formal training. There was a naïve enjoyment from creating a scene on a blank page. Over the years my early-established landscape infatuation steadily evolved to be more and more formulaic. ‘Natural landscapes’ were simplified to a repeated arched form, technological advancement simply put, time, became scaffolding remnants or pure lines of geometry, and decorative patterns were transformed into a ‘universal language’.

As the repeated creation of these organized collages quickly became entirely systemic, a new method had to be constructed. A simple formal change was able to alter the character of the work. Switching to vertically stacked images allowed for a new set of conversations including power and anxiety. The tenuousness resulting from a more than human size vertical tower is experienced completely differently than an object of equal size hanging horizontally.

The dramatic switch that occurred from that simple gesture prompted me to question the need for cataloging our personal ideas and actions entirely. There is something dishonest about attempting to reconcile an idea into a single, coherent, or resolved image. Total resolution is an unattainable level of clarity; just the attempt immediately fantasizes the objective. Therefore I choose to capitalize on the notion of entanglement where forms cannot individually describe their environment but require another to bring any of sense of understanding.

Is there anything unworthy about a painting made of just a few lines on a plane. Returning to the basics. Most recently exploring the power of line and how line can create volume, and volume can create space and space allows environments to grow. The intuitive process of drawing, considering, and then reacting, has become the essence of my practice. Where the reaction is sometimes continuation but more often the need to repair. The physical steps of working and then critiquing directly link to the mental divide of blindly believing and pressing forward and skeptically questioning and reconsidering that belief. Neither should live with out the other.

There is nothing wrong with living multiple lives, even if choosing to live in a figment of imagination. Always attempting to extend that déjà vu moment—that peek into another reality. The awful thing about ignorance is that it can very easily be taken away, and then you are left with only two options, to live in the newly opened world you had been avoiding, or pretend that the revelation never occurred.

Dealing with the frustration that even imagination is limited by individual knowledge; after all it is personal realities that directly separate and differentiate fantasies. Always attracted to recognizing the restrictions each individual is forced to work within—innate and self-inflicted.

I regularly question if that passive American girl remains my identity. Or has a new one or many emerged. And if so, does the past get traded in or can multiple personas and lives persist as time presses forward. Perhaps neither better or worse but each offering you a new set of vantage points. Living a shielded life of self-preservation, art has a way of telling and teaching many things otherwise not learned, realized, or seen.

Masked by conventions and preconceptions of what is taken for granted; a foreboding-ness is concealed by humor, color, and quirk. Nothing is what is appears to be; alluring, sly seduction, deception, and trickery. Vixens, clowns, torture or punishment. Strategic. There is no way out. A downward and inward spiral, demur but possibly resisting a scream. Suppressed emotion, shielded. Restraint.

Constant fear of slowing down, as if stopping for a moment everything would crumble. Fear and danger exist in the transition. Constant teetering. A recent removal from a ‘scened’ space, no longer grounded or given a reference location but now ‘floating’. Landscape turn object, object turn creature, perhaps wanting and yearning to exist back in a world. Is it completely and desperately isolated or entirely self-sustaining.

The imagination works solely in associations.