Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
My collage practice is rooted in a fascination with the alchemical process of shifting contexts, with putting things in relationship to one another. Max Ernst described collage as, “…the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together.” By exploring the permutability of meaning derived from visual relationships, I strive to capture and conjure the essence of something - whether that’s the essence of a material, a narrative, a feeling. This process of essentialism entails a certain degree of distillation, making only the necessary visual moves to evoke emotion and meaning, without minimizing any degree of depth or complexity. The result is work that is both figurative and abstract and ultimately an invitation to the viewer to bridge the emotional and mental gaps between seemingly disparate visuals.
Primarily working with found imagery, I view my role as a collage artist as subversive. We are inundated with media, telling us what we should be putting our attention towards, what we should look like, what we should buy, what role we should play, how we can contort ourselves to conform, what information we should consider most relevant. Collage is a mode of taking ownership of that material, to turn it back on itself, rather than simply being subjected to it.
Thematically, much of my work is focused on the visuals that would have been pushed on my mother or grandmother – baby guides, home magazines, advertisements for beauty products or domestic products – the messaging of which are nearly the same as those we see today in that they are meant to manipulate us into upholding the systems we haven’t yet been able to fully dismantle. I, in turn, manipulate these images, which are not intended to be part of an aesthetic artistic space, to tell the stories of my matrilineal line - the sense of self-determination, rage, yearning, devaluation that the women before me felt and experienced in order to process my understanding of this on a cellular level and on the tangible level of my own experience.