My works are text-based self portraits. They are an exploration of vocabulary and a distillation of language, exploring the paradox of personal and universal, private and public, as they exist in a social media driven world. The language, both in aesthetic and subject, speaks in a voice that is utterly now. This is not to say there isn’t an aura of nostalgia. That is, in fact, part of the contemporary voice, along with nihilism, humor, absurdity, artificiality, sexuality, bluntness, innocence, and anger.

Drawing upon analogue and digital processes, I incorporate screen printing’s commercial history to create contemporary poems, prints, and portraits. Glitter, stickers and puff paints reek of nostalgia, speaking to the digitized, media-adapt 2000s childhood. The text is experimental poetry distinctly existing in today’s social-digital age— social media and I have grown up together. There is a sense of publicized intimacy. The “worlds” that my poetry extends from— diary, lyrics, tv, eavesdropping, poetry, jokes, memes, mantras, childhood, are very tangible places, but the abstraction and isolation of the text, as filtered through my brain, forms a detailed, personal voice that also accesses universal relatability.

I am experimenting with negative space in language: the capacity for language to communicate, and the capacity for language to miscommunicate. Layers of text weave in and out of a multifaceted voice, sometimes more grounded than others, sometimes more mature than others, sometimes more wise, sometimes really dumb. The space that exists between these phrases allows for the viewer to imagine unexpected connections and associations. The accumulation of language creates a portrait of a human living in a hyper-media, aggressively digital world.