Interdisciplinary artist with a BA in Clinical Psychology and Studio Art from Tufts University and an MFA in Visual Arts from California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she was the recipient of a Juror’s Choice Award and a first-place award in graduate research across the university for her thesis project concerning anthropomorphism, aesthetic categories, and capitalism. She was the 2019 recipient of the National Annual Award from Collage Artists of America for her work in assemblage sculpture.

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She has exhibited her work at museums including Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Torrance Art Museum, and Millard Sheets Art Center as well as in galleries and artist-run spaces nationally, including, most recently, a solo exhibition at Pullproof in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania titled Museum of Ice Cream. She has taught at CSUN, CSSSA at CalArts, and Pratt Munson in two-dimensional design, painting, exhibition design, and aesthetics. Her work has been published in Forever Magazine. In 2023, she was an artist-in-residence at Dorland Mountain Arts. In 2024, she will be an artist-in-residence at Fish Factory in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, and will begin her Master of Social Work degree at Simmons University.

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In these oil-on-linen painted hangings, four of Aesop’s Fables are a starting point for invention and introspection. I use landscape painting as a means of exploring broader ideas about both inner and real space. Within the paintings, animal characters operate within a fableist tradition as symbolic characters that represent inherent strengths and weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and positions within humans and society. I borrowed certain animals from Aesop, but also added characters such as endangered species and pets. I find truth in specifics and by studying an imagined interaction between particular actors, I feel I can access greater truths. I have tried to make this process beautiful and enjoyable for myself and others, and have chosen an imagined bucolic setting as the site of the action.

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I have pulled imagery of both landscapes and animals from the internet, the place where contemporary visual information is seen and shared. I am interested in using source imagery from people I have never met, such as the anonymous photographers who produce images of endangered species in faraway places. Many endangered species, such as the Amur Leopard or the Sunda Tiger, are predators within their natural environments, but prey to humans. Much like the animal characters in Aesop’s Fables, they operate in a moralistic gray area that is charged with the possibility of better understanding violence, motivation, and need.

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The expressive gesture that creates brokenness and chaos injects me into the image; the iridescence within it alludes to visual motifs of contemporary visual culture.

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This series of works contains multiple stops along the second half of a hiking trip at dusk. The sun, and the light and shadows it creates, is an important actor in these scenes because the characters are all confronted with their shadows and engage or disengage from them to varying degrees. In Jungian psychology, “shadow work” is what occurs when we work to integrate unconscious aspects of the personality that do not align with our ideal version of ourselves, to work through feelings of guilt, embarrassment, or fear, uncovering repressed memories, values, or beliefs about oneself. In installing the works, I chose safety pins and needles for their potential for both mending and creating something new.

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