Artist Statement- Second Draft

My primary goal in my work is to connect to people through stories. I use my characters and narratives to turn people inward towards their own lives; my drawings may remind them of something-- a person, a place, an event, or an experience or emotion. I generally work with materials that are clean, easy to read, and familiar, which evokes the entertainment-industry feel of a lot of my work. This in turn reflects shades of the geek-culture elements which inspired my very early practice. In many ways, my work still draws from the comics, cartoons and video games of my childhood and today. Most obviously, I gravitate toward a comic book aesthetic– specifically Japanese manga– and I am now concerned with applying elements of this aesthetic to a more versatile and wide-ranging body of work.

My recent “backwards fairy tales” are, in truth, various well-known stories (many made popular by the ubiquitous animated Disney films from the 1930's to the present) which I have retold simply by inverting them. Extracting all of the major plot elements, I reverse the order, and thus create an entirely new tale. The results are comic-like drawings which utilize immediately familiar visuals to draw the viewer in, and then subvert expectations as the viewer notices that the known story is somehow off. I play with the gray area between the comfortable and familiar, and the strange and unexpected.