Personal Statement

"It is what it is" happens to be the theme song of my life. Plenty of bad has happened to me over a brief seventeen years: family deaths, separation, moving, and a surplus of internal struggles. But it is what it is. The best things to do, I've found, are to move on from the past improved by it, and to try not to ever make the same mistake twice. I know the only thing I can count on while I'm alive… is that I'm alive - and I'll always need to decide what to do about it. So far the decisions have let to a whole lot of art. My art is an outlet to share my joy and creativity to the world. I have plenty of justification to be sad, but I have even more reasons to be happy. If anything, I want my art to reflect a joy of living, and attempt at making a positive difference. If we can respond to the insistent negativity of the world with insistent positivity, it will change life for the better.

Artist Statement

Art is the highest form of communication, followed quickly by writing, with verbal interactions in third. Art transcends language barriers and makes people experience indescribable emotions with only a glance, while the other two have far more trouble with translations. Most often my art communicates how much I care, as I tend to create gifts for loved ones, and about things on my mind. When I am making art I am either attempting to understand or to appreciate something more than I already do. For this portfolio, I chose to display social issues with cardboard book dioramas, and generalized them by not giving the figurines within distinguishable genders and maintaining a consistently brown color palette. Approaching such sensitive conversation subjects in an accessible manner is beyond difficult. My attempt consists of combining fantasy with reality, in often shocking manners. For the Rapunzel book specifically, it is the sudden horror of a self-hanged figure, and a teen at that, that meets the viewer when the book is opened. The book format allows the reader time to expect joy, only to be met with sad truths. It brings up how horrible the thing may be to have happened to a beloved fairy tale character, and yet how it also happens to hundreds, if not thousands of real people worldwide each year. I tried to address some of the more common issues, including: suicide, child trafficking, misused and illegal drugs, car crashes, political distrust, and social-media-induced body dysmorphia. With each connected to a fairy tale, and the spines labeled accordingly, viewers are left to "read" about the horrible fates of each character within. On the back of three of the books I explored a manner of sharing statistics with the viewers, but on the latter three I left such exploration up to individual research. These books are less-so to grieve losses, and more-so to get conversations going. If these conversations lead to rethinking the horrors in society as the opposite of fantastical, raising awareness of their prevalency all around us, then my art will have fulfilled its purpose. We need to open our eyes to the world- art is just a guide to help us know what to look for.