Abstract
My work functions as both a documentation of and a catalyst for personal reflection. It is about everyday struggles: to understand myself, to feel authentic and whole, and to find beauty, meaning, and humor in the mundane and the in-between. I select each image that appears in my work to represent one point in time, inspired by Hope Gangloff's use of mundane objects to convey narrative through evidence. Influenced by the works of Robert Rauschenberg, I attempt to dissolve boundaries between these objects, places, bodies, and sensations and reorganize them into nonlinear narratives and catalogs of vague associations. The reflective process through which I work these images together is often self-critical, but rather than hiding that aspect, I want it readily visible. I write directly on my work, crossing out old thoughts or images but leaving them still legible and eventually leaving new comments in disdain of the old. I bind images with a network of abstract marks, informed by the works of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat, favoring connectivity and direction over specificity. The immediacy of the mark-making is also supported by the materials I use; markers, crayons, and house paints on raw canvas appear firstly as marks on a surface rather than as an illusory image. Processing these collections of genericized mundane images through a system of visible reflection and editing allows me to build a singular, honest experience from a diagram of small moments-a cross-section of internal histories.