Artist Statement
Using the language of an expanded painting practice, I examine the conditions of social class as they exist within aesthetics of the home space. Within my material assemblages and installations I use indicators of socioeconomic status to signify a narrative associated with the impossible conditions of achieving the American Dream in today’s class system. Using decorative household objects as a marker for status and taste, I’ll sometimes work with spatial arrangements found in art history and strategies of display to reinforce a discourse surrounding the complexities of unbalanced distributions of wealth and resources. Decorative materials such as furniture, lace, curtains, upholstery and linens are stretched, ripped, stuffed, knotted and pieced together. Globs of paint and spray-foam insulation seep out of the crevices, as if vomited. Armatures made from used and discarded chairs, lamp stands and table legs support the bulbous structures. The subversive treatment of decorative objects, coupled with the anthropomorphic nature and abject quality of the forms, indicate loss and decline within a decrepit domestic sphere. The somatic sculptures become portraits of an unstable figure impacted by economic distress and deteriorating family and social networks. The assemblages simultaneously mimic and destabilize the veneer of class and taste through layers of painted surface treatments on decorative objects whose forms oscillate between states of grandeur and monstrous wretchedness.