This is the philosophy that orients me with/in my process:
Through photography, installation, performance, and intervention, I aim to challenge stigma. Stigma is a fear driven two-dimensionality machine- it takes the real experience of real people and squashes it flat into stereotypes and presumptions. It is what many of us do to people and issues too difficult to comfortably comprehend. The stigmatized become bite-sized wafers that are more palatable and digestible than complex. I hope to complicate what has become flat, to flesh out experience, and to expose what is dismissed.
When faced with vulnerability and difference, we sometimes resort to the simplicity of binary thinking. These binaries include the divisive “us/them” that separates “the well” from “the sick” and “non-disabled” from “disabled.” My work blurs these distinctions with irony, play, and mystery. I present my experiences as awkward, estranged, but essentially human, such that perhaps “we” and “they” can be closer than we first imagine.
