(image detail from TEARING, complete work in the Installation section)

My work is about history, culture and identity. I explore complexity, commonality and contradiction in personal stories, historical narratives, social issues and environmental concerns. I use my queer gaze to examine memory, authenticity, and desire, while I reconfigure and recreate in order to describe departures from traditional understandings and to create new meanings. I use text, found objects and appropriated materials in an effort to create links between external and internal worlds. I tend to work in multiples and series, because it helps to establish different understandings and shifts in perspective. My use of repetition is one of the ways I try to destabilize commonly held beliefs and explore how traditional assumptions are shaped and revised.

The ideas in my texts, prints, signs, installations, photographs, videos and neon work push language and imagery to evolve and to more accurately represent an ever-changing world, one in which concepts of identity are often center stage. Using appropriation and found objects allows me to react, question, and reshape, as I reveal junctures where self-definition, interpersonal relationships, culture, the environment and history wrestle to establish meaning. Narratives describe the past as new revelations poke through the cracks of reexamination and re-telling. I explore the cohesions and the breaks in feelings, associations, events and ideas that make up the way we understand the past, reckon with the present and imagine the future.