Senior Thesis

If I would have seen my work hanging in Urban Arts Space four years ago when I was an incoming freshman at Ohio State, I don't think I would have believed it were mine. I have experimented, explored and really pushed myself so much during my time here. Following my first few years, I began becoming interested in making work of the woman's body. The works became abstracted and graphic. I was thinking about how sexualized the women's body is and worked on how to minimize that and admire the body in a different light. The works often included my body, my partner’s body or another woman. They became very intimate and personal. There is a sense of power in knowing I have control of how much I reveal or censor in my work. While making the piece “Caroline Cossey”, I was thinking about how society changes what is considered the ideal beautiful women’s body. I wanted to make something that minimized the sexualization of the woman’s body and looked at it for how beautiful it is in a different light. In my artist statement for the show I wrote “The image transfers are of three famous historical works of art that are known to be some of the most perfect & beautiful women of their times. The woman in the middle is Caroline Cossey. She's the first transgender women to pose in a playboy mag-in 1991. This play between time periods/societies and the idealized body makes me feel like I am able to rewrite history.

The works are playful and loud. I am much more focused on enjoying the time I spend making the work as well as taking in how I feel once they are finished. As I make more, I am beginning to develop this dictionary of universal symbols that feel somehow like a self portrait. There is play on scale, color and value and a tension between clean lines and the graphic drawings that take over the canvas. As I revert back to some of the most fundamental ideas in art making, I can’t help but to also feel so refreshed to be working in such a different way. This specific graphic drawing was inspired by my childhood stuffed Care Bear, Karen. She was my mothers childhood animal and was passed down to me. I find it funny to think about how the name Karen is associated with a certain type of person according to the new lingo. A “Karen” was not even thought of when she was given to my mom. I see this same connection with time in this work that I do in “Caroline Cossey”. There is this same type of graphic mark in both of the works and I love seeing them hung in the same space to really think about the change I have made in my practice. I am looking forward to continuing to work on and think about this series of work as a dictionary of symbols or some type of self portrait.