I received my BA in Art from Southern Oregon University in 2006.  Through the course of my education, my work came to focus on the female experience.  For over three years now I have been examining the relevance or fallacy of stereotypes and social expectations that are directed upon women.  I recognize female habits as rituals (e.g. shaving my legs is a subconscious connection to my sexuality) and I see life milestones as rites of passage (e.g. receiving my grandmother’s wedding rings after her funeral told me I was expected next in line to get married). 

            Three years ago I started incorporating mixed media into my work, using photography, painting, drawing, collage, and old fabric.  I use embroidery both as a method of drawing and painting.  My use of thread references traditional female pastimes, an activity of creation and domesticity, delicacy and femininity.  My embroidery represents a woman’s voice, revealing basic truths about my sex, the basic form of our emotions, thoughts, power struggles, and relationships to the stories that are told about us. 

            My work references fairytales, The Bible, and mythology.  Forms of mermaids, women-animals, Adam and Eve, Venus, and Icarus have already found their way into my work.  I even use photos of my family, Xeroxed out of my photo album.  I’m also influenced by feminist texts like The Feminine Mystique which highlights “domestic aspects of feminine existence… [as] a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.” (Friedan, 1963, 38)  This text reminded me of the domestic lives my grandmother and aunts led, translating into a photographic narrative in which my subject becomes so absorbed in her laundry that she fades away into the clothes hanging on the clothesline.  A photo of an ex-boyfriend, face sewn over with black thread, becomes the centerpiece of a drawing about regret and poor decision making – while this is a personal reflection from my life, it is a sentiment that most women and men can relate to when a bad relationship is over.

            My Xerox transfer and embroidery drawings are not concerned with filling the blank space of the page.  They are direct, and to the point, understanding the strength of color and the purpose of line.  I used to be obsessed with elaborate pattern, but have been working to communicate more precisely, and these drawings are my method of telling the world what I have learned from the women in my life, and the honesty in story telling for which I long.

            The female experience is the primary focus of my photography.  I work with multiple photo narratives to contradict stereotypes, myths, and traditional expectations of women.

            Themes of love, sexuality, femininity, maternal instinct, and domestic obligation recur throughout my work.  I often use self-portraiture as a method of expressing the emotional struggles I encounter in day to day life.  Only printing in black and white, I adore the rich tonal ranges recognizant of a long-seated nostalgia associated with the myths and stereotypes my work challenges.

            I also photograph with a plastic Holga for soft-focus double exposures that evoke a dreamlike understanding of women and memories.  There is an alluring juxtaposition between the mechanical methodology of photography and the resulting softness and delicacy of my double exposures.  Double exposures suggest memories created by the seemingly random nerve firings in our brains, resulting in overlapping images of two ideas that bring greater meaning to one another than they could produce singularly. 

            My photography aims to challenge old fictions and replace them with new truths.  I believe the accessibility of photography to viewers encourages new thought more successfully than other media.  The availability of camera phones and digital cameras enables viewers to participate in the photographic dialogue rather than feel threatened by my images.  I offer the viewer a humanistic understanding of my gender through beautifully erasing outgrown expectations.

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            In my photography, I enjoy experimenting with different cameras and print formats.  Mixing images and creating double exposures allows for new ways of thinking about memories, places, and experiences.  Our minds begin to weave a web around the two represented images and come away with something more than one of the images could have given us singularly.

            Film is still my mode of creation.  I enjoy the tangible quality of manipulating a photo in the darkroom.  The wonder of seeing an image appear out of the paper never ceases to amaze me, and is something I cannot get from digital photography.

Retinal  

            Retinal is a series of photographs created by using a Polaroid instant camera that I bought at Goodwill for only three dollars. The flash goes off on every shot unless I cover it with my hand, the focus is fixed.  I often use film from EBay, which can deliver defective or expired film that results in strange light apparitions and patterns.  Many artists call this element of chance “happy accidents,” and indeed, some of my favorite photos reveal a collaboration between me, the photographer, and the camera’s film, which seems to be an entity working of its own accord.

            Experimentation is always important in one’s work, and finding beauty in the mundane is one of the many jobs of a photographer.  When starting Retinal, I wanted to get away from the square format of photographs.  The angular corners of a square often let in extra information.  A person’s field of vision is elliptical, and when composing a photograph, it’s usually an element that strikes me.  In order to focus on that initial element of interest, I created a circular filter for my Polaroid camera using blue painter’s tape and a hand-held hole-punch. 

            The elliptical format references the human retina.  The things that strike your fancy through any day may be very plain: an unlabeled sign, a lost apple, the contrast of two colors.  Seeing these sights is not about holding up a square viewfinder to “frame the shot”; it is about seeing an element that strikes your mind and makes you think, recall, wonder, compare, and desire to capture that element for future reference.  Even people who are incapable of seeing “outside the box” are said to suffer of a condition that suggests an elliptical plane of sight: tunnel vision. 

            I consider myself blessed with sight – my appreciation of vision has always been one of the driving forces behind my desire to create art.  The act of seeing, even the ordinary, offers us the chance to revel in the beauty we find in small places and spaces, yielding an exhilaration that keeps us all believing in the magic and gratification of trying to save the world in a photo.

            I’ve been working with mixed media and feminist issues since the beginning of 2006.  About 6 months into this new focus of my work, I read The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (©1963). This book greatly influenced my work in the following months, and continues to spur mental reflection about the feminine mystique’s presence in my past, clinging to the women that I grew up around, unconsciously sliding from the tongues of relatives, friends’ parents, children’s books, or other young girls.  There were many minds in my small home town that had not escaped the idea of the feminine mystique that “makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence…into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.” (Friedan, 38)

            Incorporated with painting and photography, I use embroidery, sewing, and fabrics deliberately, as a means of referencing my implied domestic purpose.  I want to use these techniques in a way that contradicts the traditional “pretty in pink” pastimes of women.  I also use symbols and patterns to suggest particular stories, games, and moral obligations (religion?).  Stories are a very important aspect of my work, and my work questions, challenges, and rejects stories of marriage, love at first sight, knights in shining armor, physical beauty, sex as a means of purpose, motherhood, religious righteousness, and patriotism.  I consider these stories catalysts for societal rights and rituals that distinctly influence our perception of identity. 

            Viewers of my work should recall stories from their lives that raised questions about their purpose and expectations about themselves and others.  I want people to think about the way we view one another – the way gender affects our identity.  Hopefully, my work will spur people to recognize if they have believed stories, not truths, and inspire change in the way they think about themselves or the other gender. I want people to become empowered, more confident, less apologetic, more honest, and brave.  I don’t want people to be jerks.  I don’t want to be a jerk.

            But we can’t have everything now, can we? 

            Can we?