My work is about an inner struggle, which stems from the shifting nature of my own identity being constantly displaced and re-imagined. My paintings and performances are propositions for a utopic world. They offer a place for identity to rest and are defined through ritualistic movements, which are inescapably mine. While I work in several mediums including paintings, performance, installation and sculpture, this thesis paper is an exploration of the work I have produced specifically over the last six months

The work I create attempts to explore the vast precipice between adolescence and adulthood. Our whole lives we are essentially labeled one or the other yet we are often striving to be the one we are not. Childhood is fleeting, gone the moment we realize how truly special it is. Adulthood is elusive, ever looming yet continually out of reach. I choose to work with materials and imagery that is commonly known to us as children and attempt to make it a more "grown-up" version of itself. This allows for several layers of meaning. It can be a simple reminder of days past and an encouragement to not take ourselves too seriously. It is also an attempt to find the fine line between children acting like adults and adults being children. Often we dress ourselves up and pretend to be something we're not. Maybe we're fooling everyone. Maybe we're only fooling ourselves.

Femininity, in its normative socially driven state, is not a natural trait but a ghost that bears its past incarnations. I am interested in gender as a haunting social apparatus. Gender roles and representations have shifted throughout history, yet remain firmly attached to their antecedents. My creative research focuses on femininity as set forth in religion, social practices, and cultural phenomena and how these forces intersect at the present moment to create a complicated relationship of gender identity and expectations.

At the state fair, everything comes in candy colors, everything is bright, shining, blinking, glowing, popping, chirping, everyone wins! Even the carnies, dried and brown and tired, push shy teenagers towards each other like smoke-stained Cupids. Why don't you win that pretty girl a rose? How can you help but smile? Laugh? Spin and shriek on the rides, get your hands and face sticky with funnel cake and giant hot dogs and win your girl a prize? The fair is its own world, designed and built to please. But what happens when it isn't being enjoyed? When all its color and flash fail?

In the course of studying painting for the past three years at the University of Iowa, I have found collaborating with other artists to be a great way for me to try on different hats. Two of these collaborations in particular, The Old Man Study Group with Hamlett Dobbins (Memphis, TN) and The Coracle Drawing Club with David Dunlap (Iowa City, IA), have given me the license and opportunity to pretend to be someone else. These collaborative projects have asked me to consider, and at times adopt, even if only for a moment, the interests and concerns of another maker. A few months into these two projects, I noticed that the work I was making on my own, in the isolation of my own studio, was suddenly open to the world's innovations, and not just my own.

Globalization and industrialization has allowed designers and artists to visualize and create artifacts and consumer goods at an extremely rapid rate. As a result, the public consumes and disposes of these objects at a rapid rate as well because these objects are readily available and inexpensive. Technological innovation, clever advertising, and fleeting design trends have led people to overconsumption and obsession over ownership of objects. The integration of computer aided design technologies into object making practices has accelerated the rate of production and consumption. Material objects have become disposable which has proven to have a negative impact on the environment. I am employing Computer Numerical Control and Rapid Prototyping technologies to design and produce functional pieces out of wood and metal. Mechanical production enables me to experiment with form and surface texture but also eliminates direct physical contact with the object. This disconnect causes a tension between the method of production and the intended interaction and interpretation between user and object. This tension influences my work and my objective is to reconcile the rather impersonal production techniques by creating functional objects that evoke feelings of slowness, appreciation and physical interaction. My master's research is to create objects that involve the user in a kinesthetic and sensual experience in order to evoke an emotional response and establish an interaction beyond the appreciation of the visual. I am experimenting with the application of surface texture in order to design objects that can engage the user in a more substantial and personal experience through touch. Through this engagement it is my hope that the life cycle of the object can be extended in order to slow down the cycle of production and consumption.

This is not the creation of a self-contained world rooted in its own interior logic; this is the re-creation of a world through remembering, recording, and reformatting, embedded in a larger system. Ultimately this world investigates humanity's obsessive quest to study, capture, and categorize every living thing. When we get close enough to study each other, we obliterate what we are trying to understand. The forms in my work are cartographic - maps of a place and time but in an experiential rather than a literal sense. As I trace the depictions of the natural world from 17th century botanical engravings to my mother's floral couch circa 1990, I uncover hidden desires embedded in the everyday objects around us. It is deeply rooted in suburban and familial relationships - the desire to surround the home with images of "nature", while nature remains something wild, outside us, beyond the lawns, a counterpoint to humanity. The perception of this distance from the natural world is what allows for our romance and fascination with it, therefore fueling debates over "nature" or "nurture". Rather than create sublime images that reinforce a spellbound vision of nature's dominance over man, or by contrast to create a critique of man's command over nature, I am delving into domestic, artificial, and kitsch representations with equal measures of sentimentality and criticism.

Why do we keep things? To remember. Bedside tables are our modern-day altars, places where habit, respect, mystery, and love collide. Our physical materials wait while we travel through dreams, coaxing us back into activity come morning. Books and remote controls summon sleep, alarm clocks and written reminders startle the mind into a wakeful state. But not all objects are directly linked to sleeping or waking; some things simply exist to comfort us, reflecting our need to gather, collect, and nest.

Over the course of my time here at Iowa, my work has taken a turn I never anticipated. I will reflect on the reasons for my transition from looking out the window to looking in. Although the work has shifted drastically, my motivations to create have remained the same. I owe the limited understanding I have of these motivations to the reading I engage in alongside my creating. If I had to identify the most seminal books of my time in graduate school, I would single out A Place of My Own, by Michael Pollan and Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. I will discuss how these and other texts have influenced my work, while accounting for the shifts I have made over the past three years.

Through acts of preservation my work deals with perceptions of identity and tradition within family structures while also addressing our expectations of photography and the ways in which it fails. Photographs continually promise what they cannot deliver. They are a physical object denoting the possibility of an infinite existence yet represents how ephemeral these experiences and we are. They represent our memories, good or bad, without empathy, serving as hatch marks on our lives, forcing us to always look backwards for the answers. With a slight sorrow, we reflect on past realities of ex lovers, relatives, vacations, and all of the other moments we deemed worthy enough of documenting. We build catalogues of our lives, which become seas of anonymity for future generations. This work is about the failure in our perceptions of infinity and the medium we've come to rely so heavily on to represent us as once being present. Through photographs, film, and performances of familial traditions I examine relations of these acts and places to a sense of existence, creating a language of self-reference to map the past.