"Resistance/Persistence (It Takes Us To Make You)" - charcoal and encaustic on panel; 18" x 53"; 2022 (Commissioned by the PHL International Airport for a year-long exhibition "Jawn 6: It's a Philly Thing")

​Para•dox   (2019-present)

           If drawing is defined as mark-making, then writing is drawing. 
           Language, as an open system, shapes the speaker while consistently evolving despite the speaker. 
           In our computer-mediated digital age, materiality must be situated as distinct from physicality. 

My material is language; my physical media are encaustic and paper. These works begin by my drawing text rooted in my experience as a queer woman in America. I approach the page in terms of proportional concerns rather than solely ideas of handwriting, studying each letter as line, shape, and form, and then I layer this drawn text into palimpsests which simultaneously reinforce and fragment the root/meaning of the language.

​At the fore of this process is my attempt to engage with the ways in which language uniquely serves as a simultaneous metaphor for both the individual and the systems at play within a given culture (here: USA, English). Any language evolves alongside a culture, a milieu, a hegemony, a community, a locality. As the living, breathing, material entity that it is, that language then has a hand in shaping the mind of its speaker.
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This series is not one of concrete poetry, nor ekphrasis, and it is not solely a painting; rather the work oscillates between and among all of these at once, leaving the viewers to grapple with their relationship to language.