Do you work with images? If yes, how, if no, what is your relationship to images?

I often think in images. Performative images. Some still, some in motion – often repetitive motion, an oscillation. Like single frames of a film – stuck in a loop, frozen, moving backwards, repeating, sewn together. As I work, I am very aware of constructing what image the audience will see throughout the entirety of the process – very aware of constructing the frame, as well.

The power of perspective...
The power of perception...

I am inspired by photographs. I am inspired by film. I am inspired by images I see in my daily existence: a shoe under a table, a hand lovingly placed on a leg, looks of confusion, silhouette, the way light transforms a corner of the room...

I generate in images, gathering them one at a time.
In development, I string them together.

As I think about how I work, where my interests are drawn, and search for the core of why and how I use images, I’m quickly led to my anthropological thoughts and inclinations...(obsessions...?)

Humans are deeply affected by images. They infiltrate our beliefs about ourselves, our dreams. They nestle deep into our psyche and tuck themselves away, affecting future thoughts and decisions, often even without the awareness of our conscious mind. Humans’ relationship to image is extremely powerful... I believe that many of the difficulties we face as humans in the 21st century come from the images we propagate and are surrounded (bombarded) by. It is innately human to want to belong – to a family, a community...we are like wolves. And because we all want this so deeply (and often desperately), corporations and consumerism have successfully taken over, feeding on this fear. We are fed images and ideas of what it means to belong, of what you need to look and be like (of what you need to not look and not be like) in order to be good, beautiful, unique, interesting, cool, accepted, loved...

It’s an epidemic.
One I am deeply, personally affected by...

I want to infiltrate with some other images. Other images of what it means to be a woman, what it means to work, what it means to be beautiful, powerful, strong, brave, honest, fulfilled...
People don’t know how to deal with themselves. We fear being alone. We fear ourselves. We fear each other. And I believe connectivity is the in-road to that process of looking inward, making changes, and learning to love yourself (vs. looking to external people, places, and things to provide a false and temporary place holder for that). We feel so alone so much of the time because what we are shown to be ‘the human experience’ is a false, constructed facade that doesn’t actually exist. We are in a constant state of telling ourselves: We’re not enough. You’re not enough.

(I’m not enough...)

We are voyeurs. We want to look in on other people’s experiences and we want them to resemble our own - external reassurance that we’re ‘normal,’ we’re okay, we’re enough. This is particularly evident in our growing cultural obsession with ‘reality’ tv – a medium that has become more false (and therefore more detrimental to our collective psyche) then fiction. We want connections. We want community. But this desire has only allowed the same business practices to take hold, feed on our fear, and manipulate, further reinforcing these false ideas of what and how and who ‘real’ people are.

People take great relief in genuinely connecting to another person through a shared experience, sentiment, feeling, image... What if people didn’t have to alienate and torture others as a defense mechanism, a deflection of their own insecurities and feelings of not belonging? What if people felt the greatest sense of belonging when they were most themselves?

Perhaps if we were surrounded by other images, images that support the true cultivation of an individual – a unique individual – we could start to shift this mentality, shift these definitions.

I want to infiltrate.
I want to connect people to each other through highlighting the shared aspects of the real human experience.
I want to present some other images.
I want to magnify, highlight, extract, and trigger the real, the raw.
I want to invoke social change, healing, and unity through creativity and an acknowledgement of the aspects of humanity that are truly shared.

new mantra in honor of the true self. (she has worth) (and ideas...)

recited each time i 'enter' 'artistic' time:

something small
something tall
all things, all
DO