Currently, most of my work is self-exploratory. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve realized that the best way to handle my thoughts is through fully understanding and accepting myself first.
I’ve picked apart emotional states, psychological ideas, relationships, and memories to see the layers that make them so complex (which is why a lot of my work is so compositionally dense).
After I have dissected the concept, I try to understand what parts of it make it so significant to me, then I put the concept back together in a piece of art (or multiple pieces if I’m working on a series).
Sometimes, I revisit finished pieces and create new work based on them to continue to build on what I’ve understood about myself. However, it’s hard to understand yourself; it gets messy.
My art and its process has given me the stability I need to continue to learn about myself, and through that, I’ve grown a lot as a person. Through personal growth, I’ve been able to understand and uplift the people around me, which is a reason why I continue to create what I create.
Mind Mischief Nostalgia: Titled after a playlist full of songs I listened to when I lived in this house, this self-portrait is a collection of memories and fragments from other drawings I made then that makes me painfully nostalgic about this part of my life. The pink cloud of breath that contains the house address was added months later when I felt the nostalgia fade away as I was letting go and moving on.
Untitled: My appearance has always been a vital medium in expressing myself, however, during my upbringing I’ve repressed a lot of the appearance-related concepts because of my fear of judgement. On my 18th birthday, I decided I would test my creativity by setting up a shoot where I could express repressed parts of my identity using only props I already have in my home.
Dial Up: After being transported to a vivid (false) memory after listening to the song Dial Up by Childish Gambino, I immediately created a drawing to safe keep it, which is what this installation is based on. I created the Dial Up installation to understand why I felt such a strong urge to safe keep the components of the Dial Up drawing.
Carillon is a stop motion animation of a model I made of the hospital room where I lost a lot of my innocence. Looking back, I think about how childlike I was before I was hospitalized. To mirror this idea, I took ideas from the process of creating my earliest form of art as a child, which were doll-houses.