When I was 12 years old, my artwork and poetry sent me to the principal’s office where she asked me in a tone forever burned into my memory, “Are you suicidal honey?”. I was frustrated (albeit not suicidal) but too scared at the time to really let her know what I thought of the question. It wasn’t until many years later that I finally gave my response as a self portrait with a gun in my mouth, intensely staring down the viewer in direct defiance, daring them to come closer and ask me again. This experience didn’t inhibit my exploration of controversial ideas. If anything, it showed me just how much art can push buttons and elicit strong reactions.
My Artistic Muse is a fickle but steadfast lover. She loves me one day and leaves me the next, only to return some time later with a fresh bouquet of ideas. The skills I have attained have been solely at the service of relaying those ideas with the most authenticity and purity to the initial vision. Content is at the center of my work; the punchline, the metaphor which likely come from both subconscious feeling and memory. Where words are lost, imagery can take over, thus I feel no need to explain my work, allowing for the viewer to interpret each painting entirely by and for themselves. I enjoy the diversity of viewpoints where a single painting can elicit contempt in one person and attraction in another.
I aim to create a seamless and direct interaction between my subconscious core and my painting surface. I allow the image I envision to remain unfettered by my trying to understand it as I attempt to relay it as purely
Zas possible. Only after I am finished, and slowly at that, do I understand what it was I was trying to relay. I experience the world around me through my eyes and body thus I primarily use myself and my husband as the main characters of the play of life. Painting is therapeutic as I cannot control the world in and around me but I can control a painting and have it become a physical emblem of my experiential viewpoint.
Education & Experiences
2015- Master of Fine Arts, Painting at the New York Academy of Art, New York City
2011-2014 Assistant at Richard Solomon Artists Representative, New York City
2013-2014 Freelance Project Manager at Betty Dodson Foundation, New York City
2011 Founder, organizer, and art director of Emerge for Charity, New York City
2007-2011 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City
Exhibitions
2011 Fashion Institute of Technology Juried Senior Thesis Show 2011, The Museum at F.I.T.
2011 Raw Artists Group Show 2011, La Pomme
Awards & Residencies
2016 2-month-stipend of Leipzig International Art Programme Residency, Summer 2016
2015-2016 New York Academy Merit Scholar Award for the First Year of Study
2015 Leslie T. And Francis Posey Foundation Scholarship
