Artist Statement

Conceive, design, produce, and exhibit a complete video art project that brings together skills and concepts I have learned in my critical studies and studio practice courses.

In a society focused on the individual, how is community formed? As individuals predisposed to the built-in barrier of our body, our skin, how do we mediate between the self and the external? During this mediation on the barriers between our body, ourselves, and the outside world, how is consciousness simultaneously conflicted and built upon? What does it mean to be alive, to be a complex individual surrounded by a multitude of complex individuals? Can we, as a society, learn to focus balance the community and the individual? ONLY WE CAN PULL attempts to answer these questions through a series of first-person singular “I” poems, first-person plural “we” poems, and a range of second- and third-person poems interspersed throughout. The poems in this collection show language as a transformative force, able to shape consciousness, depending on the lens and distance through which one views a person, experience, or moment. In the hopes, ONLY WE CAN PULL is a sample-sized collage foregrounding the multiple, fragile paths that lead to the deceptively simple four-letter word “life.”

My work explores the gray area and the shifting border between "us" and "other." It investigates the helplessness and the submissiveness on both sides of this spectrum and one's passivity that makes the "pain of others" inevitable. Moreover, it examines the individual and collective experiences of guilt and complicity in relation to world events. I am interested in the selective and repressed memories of individuals and nations, the reluctance to look and the ability to forget.

My work focuses on the fantastic and the peculiar. It grows out of an interest in animals, myth, and the human tendency to anthropomorphize.

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens. In this manuscript, the speaker is fluid and mainly seen in the first person plural, or the collective, “we.” This voice includes the average media-driven American, as well as one who is considering how social media impacts their current lifestyles. In VS, the speaker represents various voices of faceless social media users who are separated from the physical world by the screens themselves and by digital avatars disguising further what is real. And yet, the speaker also represents a voiceless natural world—such as if it had the ability to forbid our modern ways of life from diminishing the world’s natural resources and curb further global pollution—while always questioning how these ways of life are being preserved on the physical land we live on and alongside.

ARTIST My work is a melding of mythology and personal experience. Growing up in the harsh desert of the Coachella Valley, I found refuge in music and art. My desire to become a drummer has leaded me to create a persona called Baby Lamb. Baby Lamb is a symbolic representation, as well as a physical manifestation of this desire and she is slowly evolving, eventually becoming my alter ego. Currently, the artwork that I create is a chapter in the life story of Baby Lamb. BABY LAMB Baby Lamb's art shows have included a collection of relics that have been made into a visual documentary of the artist's evolutionary presence. With guidance from Mama Lamb, Baby Lamb's ethereal mentor and ultimate drum Goddess; Baby Lamb is expressed through a variety of drum artifacts challenged by some of the most prominent drummers of our lifetime, John Bonham, Buddy Rich, and Jon Theodore. MAMA LAMB Mama Lamb is the original drum Goddess. She is a derivative of ancient rhythm masters from every spectrum of the universe and into the unknown. Mama Lamb is a symbol personified through earthly materials such as clay, glass, and real drum paraphernalia. Through these objects, Mama Lamb is able to help guide Baby Lamb into her authenticate self.

"It's not a mask, it's an appendix". Reflections through text and moving image around the Beauty Community as a representative expression of individuality on the internet.  The Essay also contains thoughts around the authors artistical practice. / Documentation Photos of the Master Exam Exhibition "The Compliment Machine". The first edition of the essay was used as an appendix, complementary to the artworks.   Photographer: Jean Baptiste Béranger / Documentation Photo from the Essay Release organised 12 of april 2018 by fellow master students. The photo illustrates the presentation of the second and final edition of the essay. Photographer: Karolina Oxelväg / <p>The master work includes both a written and a performing part. </p><p>Masterarbetet består av en skriftlig och en gestaltande del.</p>