My work has evolved from an early interest in Pop Art
and icons of American pop culture expressed through
popular imagery and cultural artifacts. I explore
visual symbol for what it represents both literally
and metaphorically.
I am fascinated with the psychological disavowal that
is required to live with and accept the pervasive
cultural narratives of childhood, power, and gender.
Simultaneous acceptance of contradicting information
is rooted in these narratives. Childhood, as a
concept, is a place charged with fantasies of freedom
and innocents. It is addressed in my work by
appropriating familiar imagery and reconstructing it
on an image surface in a self-reflexive and highly
material approach. Through techniques of layering and
erasing of visual elements and texts, I present
conflicting ideas and develop a trace of my
psychological process. In reworking the surface, each
layer brings me further into the dialectics of the
issues being addressed.
Toys and children’s books become objects of
ritual when in a culture like ours they are imbued
with conscious and unconscious meaning. The various
meanings are based in cultural constructs of gender
and power. To illustrate the construction of
childhood imagery, larger-than-life ceramic sculptures
of iconic toys and books demonstrate a banality that
comes from being oversized and heavy while also
fragile; mimicking the duality in childhood mythology.
I use humor to juxtapose the underlying presence and
psychological consequence of the menacing cultural
narratives intrinsic in children’s toys and books.
Power is trivialized and becomes symbolically
accessible in stylized toys such as guns, jet planes,
and rocket cars where the violence is hidden under
their glazed surfaces.
Fantasies of power are closely linked to gender
identities. Gender identities that are formed in
childhood depend greatly on visual representation in
media images and toys. The toys that seem to reflect
the innocence and freedom of childhood are embedded
with weighty social contracts dictating gender
identities. I incorporate images of toys and children
performing gender roles in combination with ghost
images into my investigations of American pop culture
and its fantasies to show the disparity between our
idealized fantasies and our physical based realities.