As a Hamilton-based artist, I feel it is important to understand class distinctions in our urban spaces; how our environments are a reflection of how our economy treats us. Growing up with an immigrant mother and a school teacher father, I’ve learned the significance in teaching, helping, and understanding each other rather than to be combative with bias. Art is a great tool for this, as it connects us through stimulating visual empathy. Having difficulty speaking at a young age, drawing was my preferred way of communicating and the start of my therapeutic relationship to art. Experiencing mental illness myself and with those close to me, I find it easier to put emotions into abstracted visual art. Primarily an oil painter, as well as practicing ballet, photography, film, music and collage, I’ve come to appreciate different forms of expression as its own performative language.Thesis: Table For No OneI acknowledge my mother who has taught me the complexities of life but the unavoidable loveable relation of mother and child. I also acknowledge my father who has taught me the love of philosophy and working-class culture. The two are my heart and brains.
Relating back to the phenomenon of being and the imaginative, I create large-scale oil paintings portraying my own inner reality in turn questioning what ‘real’ can be. Using performative expression stemming from previous experience in ballet and music, these paintings are open and honest. Continuing on the still life, I have focused on objects and how they signify the presence as well as absence of the figure. These objects are unstable and awkward, representing the plasticity that your environment can possess. They are psycho-active domestic spaces, consumerist items, coping mechanisms and anxious mark-making materializing the realm of dissociation of today’s engulfing consumerist culture. But also showing how the inability to control my imagination has overwhelmed me, to the point of flipping chairs to deter ghosts. For interior abstracted compositions and simplistic yet deep in meaning subject matter, I’ve looked at artists such as Florence Hutchings, Philip Guston, Louis Olaso, Angel Otero and more. Continuing on these visual cues, I use contrasting colours and vigorous brush work on paper to match my impulsiveness. When combining Camus’s existential philosophies of totality in being-ness, of paradoxically addressing our essence when addressing objects, and Beckett’s plays of absurdism, I allow a flow of subject matter to occur without deconstruction to reflect our human behavior. In turn, this questions what it means to exist but also fills answers with doubt. This can be seen in dice representing randomness, cigarettes, drugs, and bottles for coping or self-destruction, and emotional abstraction. I relate to research of Gaston Bachelard in “Poetics of Space”, talking of how we bring our earliest memories, our dwellings, and our imagination to the spaces that we create inhabitants within; we “house our unconscious”. Using the nostalgic feeling of memories, I have created works such as a diptych on the complex relationship between me and my mother; how an unfortunate past and excessively accumulated belongings has worked through her towards me. The collecting behaviour of my mom and the house we lived in making a full turn around, overarching my obsessions with the psychology of objects. In summary, painting has become its own language of affect to represent the turmoil between my relationships and environments; a window into an inner psyche. I hope to bring my internal spewage to the outer realm, to juxtaposition humour and sadness in a life of absurdity.