Artist Statement

My youth was spent in a suburban strip mall.  

I was raised in upper middle class suburbia never wanting for anything more than another pair of designer jeans.  

I am an average Middle American girl who understands mediocrity better than any other societal norm.  

I have a love hate relationship for all things plastic, shiny and fake. I have a want for authenticity, class and being above average along with most other Americans, but have no real sense of what authenticity really is.  

I have the burden of guilt for being content in my mediocrity.  I don't think I am alone.

My current work creates comparisons with appropriated popular culture imagery such as storefronts, department store interiors, magazine ads and American cinema.  Using a fairly ridiculous and comic tone, I am questioning the close relationship between a want and its loss, consumption and its debt, and a beginning and its end. 

Often using image references from marketing campaigns, mall interiors, current advertisements and art historical references I am creating comparisons to question the environments we build for ourselves. I am peeling back my upbringing and examining my surroundings to examine today's American culture and how it pertains to genuineness, facades and the responsibility that goes along with the awareness of ones decisions.

Edenwood (a Contemporary Western Film)
Estimated Release: Summer 2008

Edenwood is a near feature-length film comparing suburban America to themes typical of the Western genre of film—greed, desire, theft, and good versus evil.  The most American of film genres, Western films are commonly about the search for gold, riches, and self-worth placed within the context of westward expansion. Through a contemporary lens of strip-malls, urban sprawl, and mounting credit card debt, Edenwood explores the American desire of more just for the sake of more, a desire that has long been engrained in the American psyche.

Edenwood will be an approximately hour-long comedy highlighting the ridiculousness of over consumption, wants versus needs, self-image versus self worth, and greed.  I am optimistic of it being simultaneously a hopeful look at our current state of society and a biting social satire. 

The plot, loosely based on the 1936 film Ghost Town Gold, follows 10 characters and their search for fame and riches while locked in a battle of good versus evil. Like any good Western, the good guys, of course, win in the end.

The characters of Edenwood embody an embellished look at different aspects of American society today.  There is a over active social director, a tipsy sidekick with too many student loans named Sallie Mae, information technology specialists, fitness enthusiasts and an infomercial sales character, to name a few.  The visual tone of the film will attempt to exaggerate contemporary suburbia. Camera angles and camera movements mimic the over-dramatized cinematography of historical western films, such as Sergio Leone’s Fist Full or Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  The costumes, props and set design elements will be extremely bright and over the top to add an overwhelming saturation of color to the movie. The musical score will have an updated Western tone.