This land

By presenting familiar forms and materials through photographic print media, assemblage and cast objects, I use simulacra, minimalist form and materiality to ask questions surrounding human relationships. Specifically, I make connections between our handling of various landscapes and their resources and how this echoes our relationships and behavior towards one another. I ask questions surrounding otherness, as it relates to our biological need to decipher, origin as it relates to our disconnections and connections of place, as it relates to migration, as well as ideas of exploitation, privilege and how we arbitrarily assign value and power.

These works often serve as a field guide or a place where images and objects come together as a grouping to connect research, specific histories and to ask questions about the human experience, our cultures and our ecosystems. The work is often playful and absurd and I use these motifs to create an open invitation for dialogue and questions as well as the opportunity to be informed.

Theories, ideas and philosophies I consider when making this work include eco-feminism, absurdist theory, existentialism, and Foucault’s writings surrounding objects of power. Along with these ideas, I reference my personal life experiences and relationships, both positive and negative, as well as an ongoing research project I have been conducting for several years surrounding our national borders. There will be much emphasis on the borders research project as it dramatically shifted my work throughout graduate school. This project also continues to change my ideas of what it means to be an artist for myself and for the greater public.

My MFA thesis will uncover my research and these explorations during my time at the University of Iowa. I will address my funded research trips to South America, the United States’ borders with Mexico and Canada as well as my experience of living in Iowa and amongst the greater Tallgrass Prairie ecosystem. I will introduce and discuss the works created from these experiences including their failures, transformations and the critical and abstract thinking that came before and after their existence.