RESEARCH STATEMENT

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Since 2007, my research has focused on producing collages, paintings, and drawings which explore imagery from media sources such as culture and lifestyle magazines containing inherent codifications of gender norms, and representations of luxury and consumerism. I consider the material histories of goods depicted, and how we as a human culture have assigned value to materials we live with, wear, and use to craft our identities. I re-contextualize these materials, disrupting their original intents and questioning aspects of the dynamics they perpetuate within visual culture. Aesthetic choices throughout my work are collage inspired. I consider collage a space of potential akin to compost: a continual recycling of materials in which a prolific range of transformations can occur. Collage aesthetics become a tool for ecological exploration, speculative fabulation, and queering, where I engage with the proliferation of both natural and synthetic worlds and reflect on the nature of consumer materials, their legacies and visual cultures.

 

As research, my work engages conceptual aspects of queer ecology, queer abstraction, and collage as a form of speculative fabulation, which I introduce to a broader public audience, as well as engage with other contemporary artists making work within this field of study. Exhibition and dissemination of my research occur in the form of traditional gallery spaces, community art centers, museums, academic spaces, and through workshops, lectures, panel discussions and other presentations, as well as through academic experiences as a visiting artist. My research focuses on generating artwork, participating in exhibitions, artist residencies, learning and incorporating new technologies, seeking public, academic, and scholarly lecturing opportunities, curatorial opportunities, and achieving inclusion into art collections. Additionally, I operate within a commercial gallery, which collaborates with architects and designers, and I offer as a part of my teaching practice this aspect of professional development for artists. 

 

By re-contextualizing found materials and imagery, I disrupt their original intents and question aspects of the powerful dynamics they perpetuate. Blending aesthetic categories—synthetic and organic, flora and fauna, bodily and constructed forms—allows for an investigation of the boundary between the natural and the “unnatural”. Working in this way also affirms queer hybridity by rejecting cultural hierarchies and valuing different kinds of bodies. Collage as a process allows for taking fragments of culture and reinterpreting dominant cultural norms to produce queer associations. 

 

The queerness in my work is not dependent on the original context of my original elements, but rather through the method and techniques of transformation through intermingling and collage, which emphasize queer aesthetics. The role of found imagery and the consideration of how such materials might be queered becomes infused within the process for each collage-based composition. This is engaged through aesthetic strategies of subversion, decoration, gender-bending and hybridization. I place imagery of marginalized or unrefined materials like scraps of fabric, trash, plant materials, fatty globs, flesh, hair, tentacles, bones, eggs, crystalline structures, and wood within equal territory to a Chanel purse, a pair of red Louboutin heels, or a Fabergé egg. This intermingling of natural and synthetic in intentional and multi-purposeful. I am interested in re-imagining aspects of our relationships to the natural world, subverting inherent power dynamics through challenging the original context and intention of materials, or elements lifted from common media sources, and I do this from a queer perspective, within a history of queer aesthetics. I look to David Getsy, Jack Halberstam and Lex Landcaster texts in establishing this historical context.

 

In my work I additionally abstract from imagery of objects of value, asking viewers to consider how value is defined and commodified, how particular cultural items become signifiers of desire or describe social value. I engage contemporary queer tactics of abstraction, and I am particularly interested in formal questions of queering without the presence of an understood human figure. I connect this to queer ecology’s concepts of challenging understood territories of "natural/unnatural" as well as challenging aspects of human consumption, and stereotypical hierarchies which place humans at the top of a historical (imagined) ecological pyramid.

 

I engage queer maximalism, an aesthetic prioritizing of flamboyant abundance, and a commitment to decoration and elaboration as a means of investigating identity, and critiquing, re-purposing or re-signifying cultural symbols. Maximalism functions in my work as an aesthetic means to consider relationships between the decorative, and organic through hybridity. Through the merging of broadly ranging elements, I create hybrid forms that exist in ambiguous spaces, where the synthetic and organic overlap in unexpected ways. I re-interpret familiar consumer materials through abstraction as creature-like and completely unfamiliar expressions. The forms in my work exist across the boundaries between male and female, simultaneously as familiar and strange, and functioning as a rejection of heteronormative expectations of gender. I take inspiration from Donna Haraway’s writings on compost in Staying with the Trouble as well as her concept of speculative fabulation, a practice which merges fiction and non-fiction as a mode of world-building. Speculative fabulation encourages a shift from the human-centered perspective to more fully consider non-human viewpoints, fostering an understanding of our inter-connectedness and fostering the ability to imagine and create better futures, full of creatures of the imagination. Donna Haraway applies this idea to a metaphorical understanding of compost in her writing— she addresses the idea of the biome as a place of messy entanglements, multiple structures and ideas, and looping back, cycling, recognizing “other than human” ways of being. These concepts are very in touch with ideas of queer abstraction to me, as well as my own interest in notions of object value, commodification and desire. I create performative kinship to my collaged forms. I consider collage a space of queer potential, as well as a metaphorical parallel to the process of composting— a natural recycling of matter in which a prolific range of transformations occur. For me, collage offers a conceptual and technical method for transformation, speculative fabulation, and “queering”.

 

Future goals for my research include continuing to research historical aspects of the medium collage to offer new curricular possibilities in the Painting & Drawing Area. I am currently working on a community-based, large scale collage piece during my faculty sabbatical, which will function as a prototype for future workshops and community-based artwork construction, and well as serve as groundwork for further project proposals. I will continue exhibiting regionally, nationally, and have additionally applied to multiple international opportunities for expanding research. My artwork has grown from the desire to reflect and understand layered concepts which impact the ecological environment and my community, and I am excited to continue this exploration. I look forward to seeking new opportunities for communication and collaboration with other artists, academics, students, and community members.

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NOTES:

Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination

Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Eve Sedgewick,Tendencies

Freya Gowerly, Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage

Zachary Small, The Quintessentially Queer Art of Collage

Lex Landcaster, Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art

FOUND: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction, curated by Avram Finkelstein

David Getsy texts on queer abstraction

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