A wise friend once told me that the greatest human desire is to be known. And humans, as it goes, are strange little creatures indeed.

Ultimately, my practice sits at the intersection of gender, mental health, memory, and my formative experience as a child of the Rust Belt. As a millennial, the nature of memorializing these experiences and sharing these stories has been distorted through the lens of the social media experience and the parasocial landscape experience. How we share our stories – what it means to be known in the twenty-first century – has been irrevocably changed by the fractious lens that is considering how imaginary audiences will consume any communique that is shown to an online audience. In short: we are a society of performance, even beyond the framework Judith Butler built ages ago.

Feminisms, politics, and class are central lenses through which I construct my narratives and populism versus authority act as the tension that colors context during distribution. My largest body of work, The Psychodynamic Sequence, specifically deconstructs the internalized struggle of gender and mental illness and expresses these struggles in externalized forms. Other works, such as The Past Seven Days or Citation Needed, play with concepts such as the performance without body, physical agency, and the disabled body in space.

Given my interest in the tension between performative storytelling, authenticity, and sharing lived experience, my practice is somewhat medium-agnostic. Trained as a painter, my work often lives in the sound and installation space, but ultimately my choice in medium centers around this singular question: does the vehicle inspire radical empathy in the audience? Is it able to bridge the divide between my lived experience and theirs?