GARLAND PARTY
These paintings, installations, and encaustics convey a colorful world seemingly untouched by the upheavals of ruin, bigotry, evil, violence, and fear, but are, in fact, a penetrating and personal view of this moment in our American life. They assert that, even at this time, the ideals of tenderness and compassion serve as the foundation of a prosperous society.
You could say that I want to challenge perceptions, beginning with the idea of a fixed self, gender, body, or ontology, including the perception that delight and tenderness are not part of a discourse of political protest and protection.
With a preference for motes of pure pigment, pencilled lines, metallic, neon, and iridescent color, I’ve developed a personal iconography. By presenting tangibly politicized objects and images in pacific settings— guns, rainbows, clouds, triangles, plant life and male/female reproductive organs— these works skirt the lines of representation and abstraction to create a vantage from which to view violence and prejudice.
I employed lines of graphite and loose constellations of shapes, favoring day-glow and translucent paint. I mixed pure pigments with water or encaustic medium or applied them directly to create celestial compositions of colors. Throughout the year, my work became simplified. I let myself go, scattering handfuls of pleasures across surfaces. It has been liberating to let particles of pigment direct the topography of the resulting work.
I’ve also explored the whimsical possibilities of installations, joining materials from the cultures of construction, craft, and play to create hanging sculptures. These immersive forms reveal the armature of their own making and invite us inside to question our expectations about reality.
I hope that experiencing familiar impulses in new surroundings will educate our emotions and influence a comprehensive reconsideration of how we treat the world, each other, and ourselves.
Bio Note:
I make joyful 2D and installation art to counter cruelty in the world by creating lighthearted environments in which to contemplate politically charged imagery.
As I developed a practice in painting, drawing, encaustic, installation art, and neon, everyday materials and processes would prove particularly important to me. I have a rigorous studio practice with a restrained, meticulous way of working in multiple areas around my home in Tucson, Arizona. It was not until the age of thirty that I decided to become a visual artist. Lack of formal training in the genre has led to unlikely pairings of methods and materials. I have learned to embrace accidents as moments of innovation and progress.
I am a first generation college graduate and I wouldn’t paint the way I do if I hadn’t studied poetry. I earned a BA in English at The University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at St. Mary’s College, California. My undergraduate studies introduced me to art as an agent of social change, but poetry really taught me to think (allegorically, symbolically, metaphorically). My art is on the side of life that insists, “Don’t Shoot.”
Using the most beautiful and most intense color, I present a world epitomized by one of its peaceful denizens. At the same time, I am compelled to fulfill art’s potential to serve as a form of protest. BOTH AND, a series of trans images, is at an intersection of feminism, reproductive health, and lgbtq equality. My initial drawings for the series, a subconscious response to my formerly repressed homosexuality, were made during recovery from a surgery to diagnose endometriosis (I have since had a radical hysterectomy). As a woman and a lesbian, in a culture that presupposes procreation, I feel that my purpose is to make art that inspires tenderness, compassion, and empathy.
Travel continues to be an influence and inspiration for my work— to visit museums, galleries and artists around the world, and also to discover new tools and materials. For the past few years, I have been creating a body of work with pure pigments that I discovered in Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of Peru.
I have work in private collections in New York, Seattle, Napa, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Aliso Viejo, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Phoenix, Tucson, Austin, Lima, Shanghai, and Paris.
The neon is a collaboration with Joseph Mark Hanson hansonstudios.net/