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Statement

I am a collage artist living in Brooklyn, New York. The history, community, geography, refuse, languages, and industry of my metropolis are a huge source of materials and inspiration. For the past four summers, I've been teaching art to children in rural El Salvador. This setting, too, has had a profound influence on my work. Looking at children's art and talking with them about their relationships to family, food, school, work, society and death provides such a simple visual vocabulary, so eloquent and universal. Working in collaboration with a Spanish speaking community has also shaped the development of my work, particularly my relationship to language. I like using text; I use the printed word as a pattern, and I often refer to changes in syntax in translation. A year long trip to Southeast Asia has also contributed to the use of text in my work. The printed material I found on the streets of Myanmar and in the markets of Laos I use alongside other alphabets I find compelling: Braille, Shorthand, Arabic, English from a second grade schoolbook. While traveling, I concentrated on incorporating what I found and saw in the streets, neighborhoods and marketplaces into the narratives of my pieces: people carrying towers of goods on their heads, toys constructed from tin cans and old bottles, houses and bird-feeders made of corroding metal bomb carcasses. In these countries that have been so damaged by years of war and poverty, I became fascinated by how everyday experiences and ordinary objects related to destruction, chaos, immigration, survival and loss. Something very mundane and ordinary could be a symbol of safety, shelter, or peace, while simultaneously being a relic of war. It is in this context that I am drawn to the use of simple imagery: an airplane, a house, water, shoes, birds. Combining discarded materials to make these narratives, such as a schoolgirl with a dress quilted from teabags, waves of the ocean made from lines of a Thai newspaper, or a Cambodian woman with a crushed eggshell shawl, is like creating a shrine, or providing a sanctuary for people, places and objects that need mending.

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