My work is driven by the act of seeking and the generation of apparitions. I’m a transmedial and transdisciplinary artist, who thinks in systems of human ecology. As an artist, I reject conceptions of division between the object and the ephemeral. The preoccupation I hold in the cross sectioning of art and human ecology can be easily observed through the neurosis present in my work, manifesting as a need to address historical, cultural, socio-political, and environmental concerns in simultaneity. Through a queer, disabled, Marxist-feminist lens, I generate memoir and autotheory-based work that invokes the shades of past and future; that which cannot be recovered or fully known. By embodying nostalgia and solastalgia as vivid aesthetics, my cyclical, symmetrical, and hyper-repetitive performative projects demand the analysis of tangential ties to place, ancestry, and future. Using the history of my family and intersecting cultural and environmental crises as an edifice for contemplation, I analyze the utter fluidity of this time, this place, and our transience.  

Aesthetically housing the numerous components of my work in the Arts and Crafts movement, the Industrial Revolution, and Victoriana pieces of visual culture, I situate recurrent structural issues under capitalism. Religious iconography plays a large role in my work, as I straddle the space between being a lesbian with an agnostic heart and a practicing Methodist. Physically, I collect antiques and generate handmade objects to stage vignettes and tonally address the inter and intra-personal themes in my work. I spend months making tiles, referential of those found in the churches of my ancestors, or developing dinner plates covered in text declaring sapphic hungers and fears of regressing into anorectic behavior. I incorporate antique items that I’ve picked up from places in Iowa that are no longer standing or intact after mass flooding, derechos, or other climate catastrophes. I make objects as love-letters to sapphics refuting abstaining from all forms of pleasure and consumption. The mixture of the newly handmade with hundred-plus year old furniture pieces and dresses act as my material manifestations of recurrent, re-emergent themes of restraint, repression, and redemption. 

Epistles and essays always make their way into my exhibitions. The multi-valent conversations to be had about intersecting oppressions and privileges, grief and terror, and joy and mercy, are too dense to simplify into one performative vignette. In direct alignment with climate concerns is the critique of how bodies and pleasure are policed, and the ways in which wellness is measured. I argue, throughout my work in both written epistles as well as performances, that wellness is a construction of empire. The same powers which seek to alienate the populace from global concerns and consideration for the future are those which seek to divide people from one another and ourselves. My incorporation of autotheory and memoir serves to not only personalize large scale issues, but to help myself understand my numerous roles within them. 

Ephemerality is how my installations are activated; it is how the apparitions I seek come to life. The duration of my pieces are the meat of the work itself; the documentation of my research being as important as the resulting performances. While it may take upwards of a year and a half to produce one exhibition, it will only be available to the public for two hours. By design, the exhibitions are meant to be too large for the audience to compass in two hours. That which is consumed by the audience is supposed to be fragmentary and unclear in scope, varying widely from person to person. Flooding a large space with content that leads audience members from one room to the next guarantees a variety of impressions and ever changing experiences of one body of work. Some will take away the voracious influence of Søren Kierkegaard, while others will pick up the references to Virginia Woolf and Anne Rice. These exhibitions are populated by multiple performers, acting to destabilize notions of idiosyncratic navel-gazing. Singing and repetitive statements which hammer down a core theme to a vignette creates hypnotic environments for both performers and audience members, inviting all those present to sink into the fleeting moment as one. These works, especially when performed by groups, help speak to larger fears held by many surrounding the persecution of queer bodies, the violence of capitalism and colonialism, and the overwrought terror of the climate crisis. 

The stylization of my writing and visual narratives aim to capitalize my concerns through a broader, aestheticized lens; inviting others into sharing my disquiet. My aggregate means of honoring site-specificity, addressing an internalized catalog of personal/public information, and filtering it through loaded imagery and sensorial performances is how I contextualize numerous intra-acting agents. It is my intent to display how those deeply personal, seemingly idiosyncratic issues fold into a larger, broader milieu. It is my hope to refute restraint and repression, and always aim upwards towards redemption.