Write a short statement that describes your artwork. Discuss how you came to focus on the medium or the academic research area that you wish to pursue at the graduate level. Where do you see your work going? How is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago program that you are applying to particularly suited to your professional goals?
Introduced to the arts while growing up in Kernersville, NC, I fine-tuned my live-drawing skills and conceptual formations while attending Barnard College in New York City. I started with realistic portraits, which turned more and more surreal and cerebral, until I was shredding journals, making rag dolls, and using an X-Acto knife as a paintbrush. Currently, my artwork, which includes a combination of etched cardboard, music lyrics, journal entries, embroidery, translucent oil painting, and charcoal drawing, flirts with my reflections on relationships and independence.
While each piece contains formal experimentation, I have found that artistic power comes from the little part of my soul, of my experiences, of my heart that I dump into my work in order for me to analyze myself. I have always been fascinated by how we develop an idealized sense of ourselves as unique, independent individuals while still being utterly dependent on our relationships with other people. How do we differentiate between our treatment of other people and how we treat ourselves?
Art functions as my filter for evaluating how my brain processes. My bodies of work have focused on specific issues that shaped my worldview: how racial divisions impacted my parents and my upbringing, how my attempts to control my life led to a precarious control of my meals, how broken relationships forced me to close off myself in the name of “independence”, how feelings of failure during a divorce drove me to self-destructive decisions. A few years ago, I focused on external factors and events, but during a series of life-changing moves/heartbreaks, my focus has become more internal. I imagine that my work will continue to focus on that internal struggle for at least the next year.
SAIC’s broad spectrum of painting philosophies will give me the freedom to continue to introduce a variety of media and techniques into my practice while still mining my brain for new levels of dysfunction. Experimentation and improvisation are foundational to my image-making; the energy of Chicago will give me new inspiration, and the conceptual rigor will challenge me to refine my tell-tale style and perspective.
