A born and bred Brooklynite, stuff has always been my scenery. Brownstones, corner store awnings, and people fill my landscape. I learned from my mother and grandmothers to memorialize my landscape and life through making and collecting.
I consider my paintings souvenirs of a particular time period, event, or person in my life. I understand my experience through the collection of images I recreate with paint on a single plane. I use iconography as a way of harvesting images from my life so I can put them all in one place; I’m using paint to scrapbook. I am building time capsules. Every person, sign, pattern, and object triggers nostalgia for me in some capacity. I work with kitsch because it is important to me. The sentimentality and shameless ornamentation of kitschy souvenirs, decor, and clothing philosophically inspires me. I’m drawn to kitsch because of the sentimentality infused into every ornament. The maximalist decoration in my work demonstrates my deep care for the people, environments, and objects I am depicting. I am using a collection of people, furniture, patterns, and sentimental objects to immortalize my experience. My paintings document my life in the way a diary does.
There is a push and pull with voyeurism in the scenes I construct. On the one hand, the viewer is looking at a social scene, one they weren’t explicitly invited to. In many scenes, the figures are only concerned with one another, which heightens the sense of voyeurism. To a young queer woman, these scenes are probably familiar. They might feel as though they are in the space with the subjects; they may feel like a participant rather than a voyeur. An older straight man, however, likely does not see his life and relationships reflected in the scenes I construct. He will experience my work as more of a voyeur. By painting social situations from my own life, the distance associated with artistic voyeurism collapses. I am a voyeur as a person, but not as an artist. I go about my life looking incessantly. I understand the world through visual observation. When it comes to art making, I am reflecting my world of collected images, and pressing them together on to one plane for understanding, documentation, and celebration. My matriarchal, homosocial scenes offer a corrective to the patriarchal, heteronormative figurative work that dominates art history.