OVERWHELMING SYSTEMS

My work portrays my own social and cultural desires, fears, and experiences. I employ a narrative format that shows childhood cartoon influences to attract viewers and visual complexity to sustain them. I depict fear, tension, struggle, and isolation to reveal deception, which stems from a response to structures of power. It is a representation, a questioning, and/ or a critique of the state of today\u27s human nature and subsequent condition. I employ images of animals as a stand-in for the human figure, feeling or persona. Mechanical devices are metaphors of harmful systems of culture or power. The illusion of transparency and other formal tools help unify these disparate forms to create an image that evokes an empathy toward the human dilemma and illustrates how little control we have over these harmful systems. The media of printmaking facilitates layering and also allows the imagery to be shared with a wider audience. In the creation of this work, I have been largely influenced by the dream-like qualities of Surrealism and the political work of Honore Daumier and Francisco Goya, and contemporary artists who create elaborate narratives, such as Trenton Doyle Hancock and Matthew Barney