Artist Statement

My practice focuses on the relationship between self and self-image; how we understand our physical selves through the act of image creation. I’m specifically interested in how the femme body is mediated by technology through the examination of cultural phenomena, such as gym culture and social media use, that centers the documentation of the body and in doing so upholds society’s current aesthetic regimes. Central to all my work is an exploration of my own complicity in these systems and the degree to which I use my own body to conform to societal expectations.

My experiences participating in gym culture have heightened my awareness of relational exchanges and forms of observation and surveillance that occur in these spaces. The tendency to document bodies is omnipresent in gym culture, and I have taken notice of how this form of documentation works to uphold current aesthetic regimes. Overlapping with gym culture is social media, and how the modern-day impulse to document is driven by a desire to attend to our digital selves. The phenomenon of performative behavior for the sake of documentation is uniquely modern, and I’m interested in how viewing our physical selves from an outside in perspective affects our behavior from the inside out.

Performance in my practice is treated as both a medium and a phenomenon. I consider contemporary performance art to be a method of image making, and I use it as a medium to dissect the impulse to document live action. I’m interested in how the historical documentation of performance art results in images that become disseminated through online channels and social media and are therefore vulnerable to the same gaze of digital culture. I refer to ‘the camera’ as photography, video or other forms of technology that capture a version of the self, such as a 3D scanner. Within my practice I pit performance against the camera to create a comparison of experience and concept of self. Performance is a way to negotiate the relationship with self from an internal perspective, and the camera allows a means to negotiate that relationship externally. This comparison allows for varying moments of contending with the physical self and how documentation attempts to preserve and commodify the body.

This tension is explored in my 2026 installation Self Care: Practice. For this work, I dress in athleticwear and perform rituals associated with self-care while filming myself with an iPhone on a tripod in the white cube gallery space. The acts of self-care, the white cube, and the recording iPhone are all mechanisms meant to serve the capitalist notion that my body should resist time. By nature of documentation, the work transitions from live performance to video, where my body is reduced to an image that can then become commodified. This commodification is explored in the work Allen Jones Could Sit On Me posters, 2026, a series of photographs printed to 24×36” poster sized prints. I lay across an exercise ball in various poses with the text Allen Jones Could Sit On Me printed over the image, in reference to 1960’s Pop artist Allen Jones and his sculptures Chair, Table, and Hat Rack. In Self Portrait, 2026 I address the relationship to self and technology by 3D scanning myself, and then 3D printing thirty-one busts of myself from the scan. The busts are placed in rows on a plinth and overlayed by the scattered jpeg image from the original 3D scan. By using multiples and translating the image of myself through various forms of a ‘camera’, this work explores how our concept of self is altered and reproduced using technology and media.

Claire Bishop writes in Disordered Attention how we no longer look (at art), but we document as we look. Performance art has become an action that one does with the understanding that it will be documented. By employing Philip Auslander’s distinction between documentary documentation (proving the truthful unfolding of an event) and theatrical documentation (showing an event that only occurs through the existence of the documentation itself) I attempt to study the differences and similarities between the internally and externally perceived self.

In analyzing our relationship with self through the image, I’m addressing the influence of social media and technology in commodifying our physical bodies, particularly those of femme presenting people. My work seeks to create tensions the viewer might feel in their own life; the vulnerability and humor involved in having a body, the pressure or expectation to conform that body to a standard that only exists through technology. My practice asks what it means to have a physical body during a digital age, and how our care and preservation of that body either resists or assists a capitalist agenda of upholding aesthetics.

April 2026