This Is What It Could Be (2022)

Is it possible to fully understand another human being? Why or why not?

My formal training is in printmaking and mixed media, but when I was in school I often turned to collage as a form of sketching. The collages of my youth drew from magazine clippings, found paper, and sometimes notes from family if I managed to loosen my attachment to keeping their messages intact. However, the past few years I've taken so many pictures and done so much writing...that I quite literally have a new medium available to me that was not there before.

I tend to think in fragments of images: the reflection of a neon sign in a car window at night, the blurred music screen while I am running, the vegetables chopped and ready for dinner. In my late twenties, collage feels like a way to more accurately communicate how I perceive the world. I have always had an intense need to break through an invisible glass box, and a determination to get so close to someone that we see and feel the same thing for half a second.

Some of the collages I make today are in direct conversation with relief and lithograph prints I produced in college. As a 2019 graduate, I am part of the last class of BFA students to earn their degree before the pandemic permanently ended one paradigm and ushered in another. Is the past able to speak back to the present through my current work?

A majority of the fragmented images you see within these collages have been shown before as full individual images on my social media accounts. I want people to reflect on how their interpretations change between settings. Which is more intimate: an Instagram story, or a compilation of iPhone photos printed at CVS Pharmacy, fragmented and assembled behind glass?

Or are they the same?