My work focuses on portraying the fear and confusion of what it means to be a woman. A male voice lives within anyone female presenting and battles to be at the forefront of her behavior. Misogyny through daily life and abuse from a previous male partner is the driving force behind the questions I prompt through my work. I’ve held myself back from saying this as a reason in the past. I was afraid that this would make my work a fetishization of my own trauma. In reality, the truth behind what pushes my work is what can finally allow viewer connection to the pieces and an outcry against how incredibly normalized the mistreatment of women is in western society, still, despite what the media argues. After experiencing the abuse that I went through, I began to question what I had lost within myself from the experience. I noticed pieces of my being had been replaced with anxiety. This self-questioning started to move into a broader question. If so much was lost from my individual experience, what is lost to women in general growing up in a patriarchal society that furthers notions of misogyny and abuse? I’m so tired of the narrative that abuse makes women stronger. Coming to terms with the anger and disappointment I feel seems impossible when I myself exhibit social cues of learned behavior deemed correct by the patriarchy. Yet I paint to call out these behaviors and draw a connection between how constant pressure from a society led by men changes the brain chemistry of those living under it.

I use Kitsch and camp materials to collage the overwhelming gaze of men in various forms of media and real life. Distracting forms and searching eyes show the patriarchal system that exists on every surface of our world. The male gaze is oppressive and ubiquitous and inescapable. I paint about the unwritten rules that form as a result of the male gaze, that guide women’s lives, and how I feel about the society that’s been enforcing them since the dawn of time. By confusing space in my artwork and challenging the foregrounds and backgrounds, I create a sickening landscape with hidden shadows that lurk behind figures of female representation. I let my anger and confusion guide me. My pieces contain representational subject matter of feminine ideas and motifs of objects true to my struggles with self-worth in the face of misogyny; these painted subjects are overwhelmed in a visual landscape of collaged objects. If I search within myself, I understand that even the creation of these pieces is a result of anger caused by the patriarchy; by making my work, I acknowledge the existence of its effects on the self and my own thinking of women. And it’s within this thought that the problem lies. Even in an act of defiance against the patriarchy, I myself am still falling within its rules and guidelines, collaging motifs such as lace and jewels, forms that I deem feminine because society does as well. I make my work not just to call attention to this phenomenon of gender but also to expel my own shame of having this patriarchal voice inside me.

I’ve studied gender as a phenomenon rigorously. I’d like to begin to move my work away from just the feminine self and begin to explore gender as a performance and how this performance relates to inequality overall. These ideas are loose as of now, but I see my questions moving towards the intersection of gender, capitalism, and patriarchy.