Artist Statement 2024

"Always the Cowboy"  includes a lot of little elements that pertain to my life. The print is done almost entirely with drypoint, carving directly into the zinc plate with a sharp object, and burnishing to smooth and add highlights to selected areas. It combines subtle feminine imagery with images of the highly masculinized Wild West aesthetic in a composition meant to feel cinematicly superimposed. The quote “Always the Cowboy, Never the Cow” is from a song called “I wanna be a cowboy, baby!” by the band CMAT. It's a song that my friends and I really love. The idea of the cowboy’s self-image being this kind of outlaw-free man who herds cows is interesting to me because of the irony being that cows are the ones who are truly free from expectation and the need for control, which I see as the goal of toxic masculinity. The song feels very much like the frustration of being young, confused, and overwhelmed. I wanted to take these ideas and make something that kind of looked like an old Western movie poster. It combines aspects of my personal life, embodied experiences, and interests in film and feminism. 

 “A Home of Some Kind” is a 9x9 etching made on a new plate. I started the piece with a hard ground and drew directly onto the plate to give the image a sketchy and personal feel. Hard ground is a substance that acts as a resist in the acid. You can put it on the plate, let it dry, and draw directly onto it. I like the hard ground because it allows you to be precise and have control of the plate. I put the plate in the acid for about an hour before moving on to soft ground. I used tracing paper to create stencils of certain areas of the image, like the floor and the bed. I then cut out fabrics with different textures to fit and put the soft ground into the plate for about ten minutes. If I could Go back, I probably would have left it a bit longer. Aquatint is a technique that uses spray paint to lightly coat the surface of the plate and add an even texture to areas of the plate that are exposed to the acid. It's an easy way to darken specific areas and bring attention to others. To finish the plate I did some light aquatints and used stop out very strategically to create highlights and shadows, especially around the lamp. These prints are also printed in colored ink. I used a green, blue, and transparent ink base to get the bright aqua color that I used.

The image is of my bedroom in my family's home in Ocean City, New Jersey. When I was a teenager my mother inherited the house that had been in our family for over 120 years and the two of us turned it into a rental property. It was not my childhood home but it is the place I associate most with the idea of home. 

"Woman," "Cherries," and "Relax" are part of an eight-part etching series done on used plates.  I did a lot of experimenting with color and Chine Colle in this series, especially on the ones where I included my own photos. 

The print series is inspired by vintage women's magazines and advertisements. It explores the presence of women in art and media and how a woman’s presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, etc. It represents this idea that a woman is always accompanied by her own image of herself, constantly viewing herself through the lens of the male gaze. It addresses a lot of ideas that are very personal to me and illustrates this through a timeline of learned femininity. The ordering of the piece ranges from internalized lessons of what is means to be a woman ranging from childhood to my young adult life. 

"When Salley Met the Clock" 2022

Intaglio prints carved on styrofoam board

This print series was inspired by the film, When Harry Met Sally. More specifically, it is meant to explore the way gender and marriage are represented in the genre of romantic comedies. There is a famous debate that originated from the film that questions whether a man and a woman can ever truly be just friends. It raises a lot of interesting questions about how gender influences our perception of human relationships. There is a well-remembered frame of Harry and Sally standing face to face on a path in Central Park surrounded by fall leaves. I based my composition on the background of this image to keep with the autumnal aesthetics of the film. I used similar colors and added a few key elements like the clock tower and the shoe on the path. The clock represents the film trope of a woman with a timeline to follow in order to find a man, get married, and have children at the appropriate age. Especially in the film industry, women are often told they have a shelf life. The clock is set at midnight to allude to the classic fairy tale of Cinderella losing her shoe at midnight and missing her happily ever after. For the shoe, however, I used a man’s dress shoe instead of the traditional glass slipper as an attempt to play with the gender stereotypes. The most fun thing for me when arranging new compositions was playing with color. I tried to come up with original ways to play with the theme of gender roles without doing a pink and blue, boy and girl blunt contrast. The prints became more visually interesting with the more layers I added.