Artist Statement:

Working primarily in oil on canvas, my practice has long centered on exploring the embodied experience of womanhood. In my early work, I turned the lens inward—using theatrically staged self-portraits to examine identity, agency, and the psychological complexity of being seen. By repeating myself as the subject, I sought to blur the boundaries between artist and object, pushing toward a space where the viewer might begin to see their own reflection in my form. This approach wasn’t focused on the individual, but on universality—using personal imagery to reflect a broader, collective experience of navigating the world in a female body.

In 2025, my work shifted with the beginning of a new series titled Call Time. Inspired by my partner, musician Chili Corder, and the community surrounding him, I became fascinated by the often frantic, emotionally charged moments just before a performance. Call time is when performers are tuning their instruments, troubleshooting gear, and pacing back and forth with nervous energy, simultaneously metamorphosing from non-performer to performer. It’s a time of ritual and repetition, filled with mundane, unglamorous tasks that contrast sharply with the spectacle that follows. I attend local shows with my camera in hand, capturing these raw, unfiltered moments and later translating them into large-scale oil paintings. The subjects—friends, acquaintances, and performers in the Bay Area music scene—are rendered with the same psychological intensity I once reserved for my self-portraits, revealing the vulnerability behind the persona.

Though the focus has shifted outward, the core of my work remains the same: a desire to humanize and deconstruct the myth of performance. Whether painting myself or others, I’m interested in peeling back layers of presentation to reveal vulnerability, routine, and shared humanity. By portraying musicians not in their moment of spectacle, but in the mundane preparations that precede it, Call Time continues my interest in selfhood versus subjecthood—only now through the lens of those we often forget to see as real beyond their roles.