Artist's Statement

My intention is to create visual realizations of my thoughts about issues, concerns, and questions that are informed and inspired by daily situations. Interestingly, situations that involve people most often influence my work.

Many of my mixed-media and ceramic assemblages are created with a combination of found objects and traditional art media. The juxtaposition of cultural and contextual objects serve as symbols that, once embodied in my constructions, respond to my sometimes cynical view of the hidden and masked attitudes of other people.

Over the past several years, my work has been unified by my curiosity about how visual and verbal metaphors promote objectification. Taking my lead from written and spoken language, I attempt to construct visual metaphors that challenge social circumstances and situations. As such, my work is based in a visual, critical pedagogy of cultural and social experience. I juxtapose harmless objects and text to establish visual critiques of human practices. Objects function as metaphors for people in some of my works because people have been, and continue to be, treated as objects. I see my works as visual critiques of under-challenged or problematic social and cultural situations. Unfortunately, if we focus only on the metaphors, we fail to question the situations they represent.

I believe that one of the functions of art is that it has the potential to teach us about ourselves and our world in ways that other modes of knowing do not. In this light, I perceive artworks as tangible, visual residue of artistsÍ concerted attempts at deciphering, perceiving, and interpreting the world. Artworks provide opportunities to contemplate and question social, cultural, aesthetic, historical, and philosophical norms. Through engaged intellectual, intimate, and visual interactions with my artworks, it is my hope that viewers will perceive the world differently than if they had never seen my creations.