Artist Statement

Shifting through varying and expanding identities, I construct work that creates space for me to explore and better understand the past of my queer identity and how it currently impacts my relationship to and understanding of queerness. Coming of age at the onslaught of social media left me perplexed and unaware of how to navigate my existence. My peers and I craved a connection and belonging.

Reaching puberty in the 2010s was a time and space in history that constructed avenues in a social and physical settings to come out and discuss queerness with my peers. More importantly, I had access to the internet and the ever-expanding encyclopedia of queerness that was being uploaded, hashtagged, and archived before me. I now understand the feeling of being forced to perform for my peers in a physical space while curating and exacting an online persona for their 24-hour surveillance complicated my understanding of myself. Through my work, I am reclaiming the time in my life that felt infinite but was the most restrictive. I was determined to be palatable to my cis and heterosexual counterparts. I was never wanting to be deemed as too much.

Now I have no desire to be palatable, and I wish to use my expression of my queer and trans identity to provide visibility for those who may share my experience. My work is centered around images and photographic practice. I use various devices, such as my mirrorless camera, phone, and webcam, to document and create the images I work with. This relationship is crucial as it mimics the varying ways my peers and I documented and uploaded our bodies for performance across our varying and evolving profiles and platforms.  

In my work, I pull references from images of the body that others and I have shared on social media.  Whether it is for intimate partners in the form of a nude or to upload to digital platforms as pornographic content, these images of the body are distorted and angled to accentuate erogenous zones of the body. They are then reconfigured and compressed to fit the digital format. Being a child of the internet, I feel that my body and the idea of who I am has been downloaded, morphed, and shared in ways that I am still trying to understand. I look back to the pop culture moments that defined my adolescence and work them into my current understanding of contemporary and past pop culture to reimage who I could have been if I had not felt the need to modify myself for the comforts of others. My peers and I were taught to idolize celebrities and desire a connection with these people we will never meet and never truly know anything about. Tailing off from idol worship was the development of internet culture and memes, jokes that you simply have to be chronically online to understand. I dissect and reference these chronically online moments as a means of commentary and reclaiming the time and space the internet has taken from me. While the internet has taken much, it has also given me so much, and just like all complicated relationships it is essential to have humor. My work creates a space for queer and trans individuals to feel seen. It provides an unfiltered expression of queer and trans identity, predominantly in a provocative format for those who may not have this exposure in their daily life.