Artist Statement
How do you describe a tree, is it by its definition or by a universal standard? Do our memories and experiences change or alter how we perceive a tree? Can we ever verbally or visibly show our memories without our own unique experiences changing how we perceive each other?
When I make my prints, that was what I focused on. By exploring different moments of my memories and watching as the process obscures and melds into one another. When I pulled the first state of "the Black Sun Rises" off the press, and I saw the triangular dark spot in the center. I saw it as a cavern or a hole. An emptiness that I had felt. But visually it wasn’t dark enough or deep enough, it was a little blip in a sea of beautiful noise, more standing on top of the noise and not receding into the background. So, as I worked back into the plate, I found silhouetted people and tried to carve them out of the noise, finding little moments within the process of just making. It felt caveman-like. I drew onto the plate an ominous black sun hovering over everything, creatures or beings emerged within the marks. Each time it came out of the acid I tried to maintain or find those beings. Till I had to see what was on the plate. When I pulled it, I was initially dismayed that the figures and little narrative that I had made weren’t intact, but something else felt right. Instead of looking into a hole, now I was in the hole looking out. The black sun was now the exit and it seemed to illuminate the inside of the cave. With the figures are stone-like and blended into the cave. Almost as if afraid of the light, or at the least startled by it. Maybe they were never there in the first place. For me, that new space felt closer to how people can perceive pain. The harder you look for meaning the worse it gets as the harder you try to find it, it blurs into nothingness.
This is especially true during one of the most traumatic and solitary times in history, it has become more relevant that during this collective experience, we have closed ourselves off to protect ourselves. By using experimental and counterintuitive printmaking processes to exercise the haunting collective memories. By abstracting the spaces and environments to show the remnants that reside in memories of pain I create images as a dark mirror for the viewer to reflect on their preconceived ideas of healing or find hope within the image’s scarred unease.