Artist Statement: BFA Exhibition May 2019, Urban Arts Space OSU

What is a home? Where do we call home? These are the inquiries I am pursuing in my work and the questions I seek to answer. I am faced with thoughts such as these in my daily life, like many other young adults my age. In this stage of our lives, we often leave our childhood homes and move away to college. After we have settled at college for a couple years, we graduate and join the workforce, once again facing these inquiries. With these experiences, as well as being in the Army National Guard where I find myself being told where to live without a choice, I must decide if I will allow these places to be my home. I feel like a nomad, and my art is an exploration into House and Home and what that means to me. 

I pursue paintings that deal with memory and the narrative that surrounds my childhood home and my idea of what home is. I am working from photographs of my childhood, representing these memories and images on 5 composite boards that measure 40” by 19”. I typically work with found materials; one I often use is latex paint that my dad has given me, a medium embedded with associations of family and its relationship to home, as my father also uses it to paint houses. I also use materials that relate to the home such as plywood, 2x4’s, or glass in some cases. I choose to lean my paintings instead of hanging them, supporting them from the bottom with housing materials that act as a foundation such as cinder blocks or bricks. 

I paint with a lot of texture in my work: drips and marks, thus using the paint to build up layers. I hope for the layers to feel like a history, just as a home has a history and a memory- I want these paintings to feel the same way. I include figures in my paintings, often representing myself, ultimately becoming self-portraits and depictions of my younger self. When I think of home, I imagine my childhood so these images feel like home to me. I also use handwritten text in these works, both in an effort to speak to my younger self and also address my current state and feeling toward what is happening in my life. 

Ultimately, I focus on making paintings based on Home and how home affects me currently: how I am dealing with it, what goes through my head, and my thoughts about the future as well as my relationships to these things in a physical manner. As I head out into the world with so many others, I feel that I am not alone in my thoughts about home. I want to convey these emotions in my own way yet also make art that allows others to feel nostalgic towards their own definitions of home. Ideas of comfort should be raised and also issues of home and where they may go next. 

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