ARTIST STATEMENT

December – January 2016

Websters Dictionary entry: foreigner
alien, non-native, stranger, outsider, immigrant, landed immigrant, refugee, settler, newcomer.

ANTONYMS native. WORD xenophobia

With Foreigner! I explore and correlate contemporary and historical xenophobia and migration stories. The action of the work involves research, photography and employing mechanisms of abstraction. The material result includes pictures and didactic essays. For each piece to come alive, I must provide the opportunity for readers to interact with the artwork. I, therefore, show or share as publicly as possible to expose the work. The accompanying essays supply topical information to inspire viewer reaction.

Working through the intimacy of my family history punctuates the contemporaneity and personalizes the plight characterizing today’s stake in local and international political violence fueled by racist discourses and waves of social amnesia. I work within a framework of actions to overcome resistances between the intimate, the art materials, and the external world.

I open a topic with photographic clues. Then I deepen the narrative by employing metaphor rather than literal storytelling. Authenticity, representation, and presence, in my view, belong to representational art. Mechanisms of abstraction enable me to generate discourse with anything that I am prohibited, or unable to directly access. Thus, I produce work within the genre of allegorical abstraction to convey silence, absence, and contradiction.

Please stay tuned for full image documentation of my thesis exhibition at the Vermont College of Fine Art