Artist Statement
My practice focuses on sculpture, conceptual art, painting, and multimedia.
In the Sculpture and Post-Studio Practices BFA program at the University of Colorado Boulder, I’m developing my emerging art practice with a critical focus on contemporary sculpture. By creating assemblages from common ephemeral objects and mass-produced materials or documenting routine and personal interactions in laborious detail, my work uncovers idiosyncrasies of identity contained within material and investigates the impacts of consumerism, digital media, and the development of AI in relation to the physical items that surround identity. Where my more traditional fine art explores sentimentality and self reflection through material arrangements and their subsequent narratives, my three-dimensional work traces human interaction with and within material. Whether engaging in a daily routine, public research or using consumerist visual language, I draw on familiar characteristics of daily life and expose the traces of identity and sentimentality imbued in them through the employment of careful realistic rendering or repetitive labor. My process is driven by reflection, experimentation and eclecticism.
The exploration of material identity seeded in my art practice while creating a series of several hyperrealistic graphite drawings of everyday objects and living spaces. The work earned recognition when two pieces were chosen for exhibition at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center for the BVSD Annual Spring Student Show in 2022. I was subsequently awarded my high school art department’s Drawing and Painting award. Staying rooted in my hometown to pursue fine art at CU Boulder, I continued to expand my practice in experimentation with new mediums that opened my mind to consider the layered meanings within the objects and materials of my environment and with the objects and setting of my childhood to draw inspiration from at my disposal. My hyperrealistic drawing naturally progressed to oil painting, where I rendered rousing arrangements of personal objects to dissect existential and aesthetic themes in relation to my identity. Operating in sculpture allowed me to critically approach material as directly and experimentally as possible, and in a move to continue expanding my art practice, I chose to pursue a BFA in Sculpture and Post-Studio Practices instead of accepting my selection for the highly competitive Drawing and Painting BFA program. Recognition for my painting culminated in my involvement in co-curating and exhibiting my work in the Kitsch Nouveau student show at the Crowd Collective in Boulder, where an eclectic mix of emerging artists represented CU with exciting range.
I see my practice continuing the exploration of material-identity relationships; experimenting in medium and modality to converse with personality, consumerism, advancing technology and overconsumption.
