NYC, Chicago Days
1994-2001
I was accepted as a graduate student at SAIC and moved to Chicago. This conceptual world of art challenged me to let go of technical skills and find other means of making art. I started creating installations out of ephemeral materials that spoke about desire and control and our comical negotiations between the two. Upon graduation, I began creating figurines engaged in farcical and brazen situations/battles involving gender. These pieces reflected my experiences being a young woman. They evolved into paintings that both obscured and revealed the voyeurism and violence celebrated in popular culture. The paintings became abstracted sculptures as their images were mashed together creating yet another possibility. Simultaneously I began a series of paintings that explored systems and connections, these are a pre-curser to later work that involves mapping and interweaving.