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ARTIST STATEMENT:
Where my real life anxieties, phobias, and compulsions are acted out
in dream scenarios is where I find my most inspiration. My drawings
are illustrations of mental narratives (usually played out in dreams),
fueled by anxiety. The overlap between fiction and reality within my
dream narratives has stimulated the subject matter, spatial
arrangements, and visual vocabulary in my art. Its piecemeal
composition of life's everyday elements serves as a doorway to my own
subconscious, and I often find myself attempting to decipher its
unsettling latent message through drawing.
Therein lies the purpose of my work-to poke at the subconscious fears
and secret puzzlement of my surroundings, particularly what is
unfamiliar to me and what I cannot pretend to understand. My work is
not an exploration of cultural relativism. It is as judgmental,
exoticizing, and perhaps even moralistic as I am. However, in its
unfashionable view of the other from my own perspective, it begs the
perspective of the very other I exoticize.
In
order to communicate multiple viewpoints and my own personal sense of
time collapse, I have borrowed heavily from ancient Chinese landscape
painting and children’s book illustrations. Space is manipulated so
that opposing perspectives are juxtaposed against one another on the
same plane. Likewise, two or more scenarios may play out on the same
page, side by side. Their location on the page often signifies that
the two events occurred at different times, or two events occur at the
same time in different places. My experimentation with time and space
distortion on a two dimensional plane has found new life in simple
animation, which offers room for more complexity in my storytelling.
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