Artist Statement of Purpose
Purpose
My art confronts the idea of worth. My worth, others worth, the earth’s worth, and capitalist based ideas of worth. The Anthropologist in me wonders why do many choose to suffer, instead of change. Change being the only possible experience for living beings. Once a moment ends, it is over, we can’t retrieve it from the past, forward is the only way. Choice must affect the path ahead.
I use donated materials, and found objects, as tools to engage in the conversation about why we are choosing to walk through our own industrial waste, and not choosing a solution.The individual items viscerally connect viewers to childhood memories, and reminds them of what has come from choices made innocently, in their past. Familiarity reflects the sheer individual mass of disposable goods that pass through our hands. The shine of the plastic surfaces, and often used broken mirrors, reflect the viewer in real time, furthering engaging them in the presentation of Items that have “become trash”.
My creations give the broken and discarded new worth. As a Queer person discarded and broken by AIDS, the medicalization of my person who identifies as a cultural other, and it is my mission to show this journey in my works, through materials, movement, color. Faberge said it was not the size, nor value, of the gems, that determined the final objects worth, but the overall impression of the entire effort that created the whole finished product. To take a lead from the jeweler to the Czar, and czarina’s , and apply this to what has been deemed refuse is a revolutionary undertaking