images | bio | statement | reviews

Artist Statement

In my glitch-inspired self-portraiture I study the desire, failure, and dissonance associated with portraying an idealized self for a digital audience. Adopting the perfect girl persona online has never been easier; however, the physical and emotional roles society expects women to fulfill have never been further out of reach. In this series, I create a Perfect Girl character that questions the objective reality of my body: is a representational version of myself more authentic than an abstracted and amorphous body cloud?

Through Perfect Girl, I consider how those of us coming of age with the internet have constructed alternative identities online—fantasies, really—that bear little resemblance to the person IRL. Internet-era artists have built convincingly realistic perfect girls. I take the perfect girl concept to its next logical step by transforming my image beyond the point of believable authenticity: it is fragmented, replicated, and distorted to the point of becoming disconnected from my real body. Ultimately, I use this series of works to dismantle the complicated archetypes to which women must conform in our ever-changing cyber landscape.

I use oil painting, video projection, and augmented reality to explore the effect of digital identity and social media on the collective psyche of digital natives. As younger generations are increasingly raised on the internet, our understanding of personal identity is more and more influenced by how others perceive our digital selves.