Printmaking, or the process of making images and texts reproducible in the multiple, has been central to the process of normalizing ideologies. The more an idea is circulated, the more accustomed to it we are, and the more prone we may be to accepting it. By copying, reproducing, and distributing images and texts, print has allowed for both the entrenchment of sets of ideals in a society while also providing for the possibility of their dismantling. Contemporary popular media – women’s magazines, news programs, and children’s books, for example – are particularly interesting to me because of the way that they perpetuate codes of behavior, power structures, and belief systems. The images and text generated by these media circulate and inform, and through their perpetual repetition can form an accepted “truth.”

My recent work explores depictions of violence and militarism, especially the ways that militaristic attributes circulate in contemporary pop-cultural contexts. I am interested in the ways that these powerful and potentially violent symbols of authority have been appropriated by consumer culture, and are made to seem innocuous and harmless through that process. Children’s media –including stories, toys, images, mass-market products, and games – is of particular interest because of the ways that they mimic adult objects and situations; miniaturized, sanitized, simplified, and coated in sugar-sweet colors, they exist within a veneer of harmlessness. Using the guise of play to lull and seduce viewers into participation, they can all be seen as a means of perpetuating ideologies.

I work by collecting and re-organizing information; combining, embellishing and re-making in order to uncover a different reading, removed from its original context.  Within this framework of the collage and montage of images, my approach to making visual statements is not confined to a single process. Drawing, print, video, animation, and installation all figure as means of constructing work.  In taking the notion of the computer as a matrix, all of these methods can be seen as an extension of print-based practice. I seek multiple and simultaneous outputs of an idea in order to arrive at a series of works that inform each other.

In this post 9-11 era, terror threats and color-coded safety alerts dominate the daily news, cultivating a climate of fear. Information on the latest forbidden items for air travel, how to make a survival kit, and what to do in case of a biological attack have become commonplace in the media, often bracketed between celebrity gossip, advertising, and home improvement shows. Living in a North-American context, many of us experience military conflict only through this media filter. Processed for consumption, this information is edited for broadcast into simple, easily digestible newsbites, decontextualizing the narratives. Within this environment, the language for constructing safety becomes inseparable from and confused with the language of aggression, providing justification for all sorts of questionable actions within a language of security. Aggression is cloaked under the guise of (self) protection.

Much of my work over the past five years has been fueled by an ongoing interest in the ways that images around and about militarization and militarized conflict have been circulating in North American popular media.  My current work centers around a single, awkward, cartoon-character named The Girl, pictured in an intensely-hued landscape, punctuated by disjunctive cityscapes, cotton-candy mushroom clouds, and pop-pretty explosions. The Girl is oversized, isolated, and awkward, towering over the landscape. Her presence is both menacing and protective; playing with grenades, guns, and burnt out cars, she seems oblivious to and apart from the chaos around her. Images culled from a variety of popular media sources are redrawn and simplified into lush, glossy, brightly-hued, flat compositions, each functioning like a single still frozen from a narrative animation. This series of work has thus far manifested itself as a web-based narrative, printed silk banners, large-format digital prints on paper, traditional silkscreens on paper, and a short animated video.  Together, this body of work addresses the complexity of negotiating the current socio-political climate – filled with the rhetoric of militarism, nationalism, and terrorism – through seemingly simplistic and naïve illustrative images.

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