In all of my work I question how individuals and groups define themselves and relate to each other. I focus on particular societal structures such as sports teams, game fields and performance spaces. I am always interested in ranges of gender expression. How do viewers’ subjective positions affect what they see?
Painted in Flashe and acrylic, and drawn into with pastels and crayons, my ‘dance series’ works on paper sit between painting and drawing. The figurative compositions are tense within their borders, yet allow for moments of slippage and release, mirroring my feelings about their subject—the traditional gender roles of ballroom dance. When I stumbled into taking ballroom dance lessons, I noticed immediately the rigidity of the roles. Divided into male leaders and female followers, the performance of binary gender is embedded in the gestures, reinforced by the costumes. In response to this division, I recreate ballroom positions with more fluid and open roles. I explore the contradiction between the feeling of a dance inside my body and the way that markers of gender identity are perceived from the outside. Sometimes these reimagined roles become unnamable, and the painting ceases to become a representation of ballroom, becoming instead a vision of ways of being in the world as people between genders.
The larger ‘dance series’ paintings use a border-and-center motif to challenge a static understanding of place. I push the narratives to the margins of the paintings. The large abstract centers serve as spaces for contemplation; they are mirrors, portals, and walls. Around the edges of the paintings, dancers alternate with glimpses of performance spaces in various levels of abstraction— a floor, a light show, a fog machine. The scale of the paintings encourages viewers to consider the spaces they occupy and the ways in which the structures we inhabit affect our behavior.
In ‘frames & fields’, female and androgynous athletes merge with their playing fields. The rectangle of the soccer field is compressed through different viewpoints into long strips of paper, which, when tacked onto a wall, highlight the architecture of the room, as in ‘exit field’, or ring the edge of a wall-sized canvas, as in ‘tantrum field’. I am drawn to the imperfection of the soccer field, which is both organic and geometric—its uneven surface marred by bare patches and cleat marks, yet bounded by a straight white line. I am interested in the physicality of paint as mud and the surface of the painting as a field. Colorful washes of diluted oil paint interweave with linear imagery. Wandering lines create links between remembered or imagined moments.