Projects

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This project was for my graduate exhibition.  These pieces are influenced by urban contexts, a continuing theme in my work. Street art is about reimagining public space and interjecting a sense of individuality amongst the visual pollution of advertising and city planning. I believe street art and graffiti hold a very important place in society as they speak to the potential of a city and the aspirations of the individual = reaction to the erosion of cultural diversity as a result of globalized development; cultures are being replaced with a homogenized and uniform reality which has become increasingly more prevalent across the globe.

Upcycling old bedsheets into large canvases that can mimic urban wall space. These large mural-like pieces employ a combination of paint, oil pastel, chalk, and charcoal pencil expressing a found ephemera in a dance between texture and composition, evoking the collective unconscious of urban environments. Using the backdrop of various cities, creating abstractions that can appear to be fragments of what I see in the chaos and rush of the metropolis. I want these paintings to reflect the ephemeral layers of walls that show a place that was, but no longer is – built over, renewed in some other configuration in the present, engaging memory and imagination with the contemporary expression.

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Shoes are a necessity for human life and can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. The installation “Shoefiti,” emphasizes the wastefulness of our consumerist culture. Inspired by L’entourloops’ song Shoefiti, an urban saying otherwise known as shoe tossing the shoe instillation came into being. Often seen in skate parks, skaters toss their broken shoes away onto raised wires, Urban Legends range from marking gang territory and memorializing the dead to bullied children whose shoes have been taken and thrown out of reach. A kind of memento mori, the shoes represent humans from all walks of life tangling and toppling over one another and a remembrance of the waste one leaves behind.