artist's statement

At the beginning of my artistic journey, as I assume with most creators, my glance turned inwards. An investigation and journaling of identity, displacement, and intergenerational trauma. During my studies, this exploration and subject matter were encouraged and embraced with enthusiasm by my professors and mentors.

A catalyst for the conclusion of this chapter in my work was a simple statement, made by a displaced person themselves: “Ήντα ασχολείσαι με τούτα εσύ;” in translation, “Why do you bother with this?” This wasn’t an exploratory inquiry; they weren’t trying to obtain deeper insight into my thought process or conceptual reasoning. It was categorical, “You are not entitled to bother yourself with these themes.”  

Although most narratives would want the person confronted in such a way to double down and stubbornly win over the critics, instead, it brute-forced a shift in my perspective. If the dialogue I’m trying to create with my work creates immediate resistance, then why am I trying to broach the topic at all? “Ήντα ασχολούμε” indeed “Why do I bother?”

But that statement triggered a thought process that propelled me towards my current format. How could I create in a way that first eases a viewer's resistance, and create a relationship, a cognitive push and pull, between something that initially seems innocuous, and then reveals its true message? In this attempt to find the elusive common ground, I also came across the themes that currently preoccupy me. My recent work wades into the deep pool of critical theory; inequality, decolonial theory, the society of the spectacle, and contemporary humanism as informed by Camus, Cassano, and Morin. To achieve this, I have borrowed the visual format of my work from classic Fleischer animation. Replacing the eyes with voids as commentary on the visual oversaturation and the distance that the spectacle creates (in accordance with Debord’s writings) between the viewer and the process of production. A further reinforcement of these concepts is the removal of the illusion of depth from my work; although figures overlap, the foreground and background are compressed into a shallow, superficial, dense, and claustrophobic space. My palette is limited, but brilliant, again, to limit the initial attempt at interpretation. 

In situ, I have noticed that my work is initially approached with a smile, an amusement that builds into a meditation on the piece’s true message. If the initial engagement remains at the level of the smile, the message is lost, which seems to reinforce Debord’s hypotheses regarding the passive consumption of modern life. 

Ultimately, I intend for every piece to be protest art. Amid the oversaturation of cheaply produced images and ad nauseam-recreated stories of human suffering and degradation, the viewer pauses, first amused, then hopefully horrified.