the gallery is located at 319 north 11th street in Philadelphia
My paintings are derived from cultural, commercial images of women, as they address me. The aggressive and pervasive nature of commercial imagery compels me to answer in the interest of creating a dialogue. Provoked by the shifting status and mutable portrayal of women in mass culture, I work to articulate the mixture of euphoria and dread I experience in viewing women’s magazines. Incidentally and anxiously, I discover and draw from the loss of my identity when subject to the meanderings of the female image in our culture. I treat the cultural, commercial and personal as one in my work, through a process of collecting, collaging and manipulating images into my paintings. Through this process the paintings become part self-portrait and part mass culture icon, I want to articulate where the two overlap. My work has evolved to this point through a process of examining the historical narratives and contemporary conventions used in advertising. Drawing from religious imagery, pop culture and themes of innocence, I am exploring and following visual points of tension and continuum in what allows mendacity to function as truth, and vice versa.
“I could no longer console myself with Rilke’s line: ‘Sweet as memory the mimosas steep the bedroom’….The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because it fills the sight by force, and because nothing in it can be refused or transformed (that we sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent…)” -Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
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