About Me

Artist Statement

​

I explore themes of freedom, identity, memory, and truth(s) on a personal and socio-political level across different media. I believe artists perform valuable roles in society by opening doors to other worlds, by engaging with difficult topics and shining a light on them, by provoking ideas and debates, and by building communities of creativity and mutual support.

​

As an art major in school I focused on figurative drawing and painting. More recently I have been experimenting with photography, film, printmaking and mixed media, often incorporating words into my work and pushing toward surrealism and abstraction. 

I've been shaped by living in - or between - two different cultures, having grown up "half American, half German." (I am still working on converting the "half"s to "both".) In addition to searching for my own center and grappling with different parts of my history and identity, I like looking at other stories and issues from different perspectives. This also means dealing with the complexities of holding different things to be true at the same time. For instance, the personal and political, my own identity and history collide in Ruined (2018), a collage of archival images of destruction from WWII. I was motivated by the thought that it was the coincidence of birth that drafted my grandfathers into different armies. It is also significant that I made this work at a time when Germany and the United States take very different stances on war, immigration, and solidarity than they did in the 1940s.

​

This multi-faceted approach has also drawn me toward experimenting with different media and working on series of works around a specific topic or process to investigate its different aspects and thereby get closer to a truth. My series Made With American Cotton (2020) explores our relationships with white supremacy, white womanhood, the racial wealth gap and the police state through collage and assemblage of found objects like broken police barricades and fabric scraps. This topic is too vast and complicated to be dealt with in a single piece. The exploratory process is also crucial as I am learning about American history and our current systems of oppression, and my role within them.

Even in times of "social distancing" working in dialogue with other artists and community members is a focus of my practice. Recent examples include collaborations like my video art with composer and sound artist Derek Muro (e.g. the 2020 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest-winning Pursuit of Sadness) and group shows with Austance Caroline and Conrad Clifton (e.g. Phase IV in December 2020, Outlook Hazy in May 2022).