STATEMENT OF WORK

Through an interdisciplinary practice, my work approaches personal experiences as framed by the world around me and expanded into the world beyond me. As a first generation American, I will often speak to sociopolitical things like migration & assimilation, class mobility, identity as linked to place, and home as linked to paperwork. It is a return to the notion that the personal is political, extended to the personal as cultural and relational. But of course, the personal is also simply personal, which is to say, it is the stuff of being human. So, the work also contains those things: intimacy, family, love, poetry, loss and death; tender narcissism in the search for belonging. 

Working across video, sculpture, and installation, my work often takes a form of expanded cinema. Short films are projected and mapped onto installations, typically referencing residential architecture or domestic life. The films are structured as layered vignettes, shapeshifting across the installation surfaces and weaving together imagery derived from daily observations, personal snapshot, appropriation, and cinematic abstraction. It is a fitting mode of storytelling, literally merging self and time with physical materials in the world. 

Alongside my installations, I have also been developing a body of “wall works” using materials that point to themes of home and The Dream. These works include drywall, joint compound, roofing cement, astroturf, gold leaf, and roof tiles from my childhood home. Personal narrative is still present but condensed and coded, embedded into material metaphors. I view these works as distilled versions of the American home’s ugly underbelly, coming together and falling apart, intertwined with artificial posturing––it’s a play at the lottery, or gilded trash––the long held American tradition of keeping up appearances to hide the underlying falsehoods and disappointments of our time.