Art, consists of art that extracts aspects of our culture only to throw them back in our faces. It is the
transformation from the benign—the subjects of our selective cultural blindness—to the malignant that
characterizes my fascination with Pop Art. I want to create images that question assumptions, and I intend
my paintings to render viewers uncomfortable once they begin questioning their assumptions.
Having also majored in art history, I am fascinated by the ways in which imagery profoundly influences the
psychological perceptions of a culture. My artistic research is focused upon the contemporary exploitation of
eroticised innocence as a marketing tool. Within media sources as varied as Vogue and Nickelodeon
magazine, pre-pubescent girls are portrayed as simultaneously sexually vulnerable and available, while
women masquerade as young girls—naïve and submissive. I am currently interested in what E.V. Day
describes as the employment of humor as “a tool of critique;” I believe that smirking best intensifies cringing.
My work is evolving to stand as deadpan re-presentations of the cultural fetishes marketed to very young
girls, darkly humorous views of the eroticised chimeras to which young girls look for inspiration. I am working
to create comedic objects that possess what David Robbins describes as an “aggressive, belligerent
relation to reality.”
The flat, graphic style in which I execute my paintings references the oversimplified images and candy-like
colors characteristic of comic book art and Disney animation; a method of rendering images intended to
simultaneously distill and amplify reality for consumption by children. It is a style that leaves little to the
imagination, not unlike the images from which I choose to work.
