Collage as a medium is a way for me to reconcile both the permanent dissociation I am accustomed to and the constant search for any sort of repetition and pattern that I can find.

Most of the imagery I use is appropriated from magazines from the 1940s, postcards from even earlier than that, and advertisements for a product that I’ve never even heard of. It makes me feel out of touch in a way that makes every image I’m looking at fascinating in its elusiveness. I can’t talk to the woman telling me from page 35 of the June 1944 edition of LIFE that “good things begin to happen when you have soup for lunch!” I can’t hear what the family gathered around the grand piano for what I assume is a nightly routine of musical camaraderie is laughing about.

The people portrayed in these images aren’t even real, they’re just using the faces of people that are. But as I cut these images out, lay them over each other, overlap and tear and paste them, I can see the patterns. The imagery that’s repeated over and over, the phrases, the facial expressions, so many things are eerily similar. In some ways I find it easier to express my own thoughts through the words of an article from 1996 National Geographic than I can anywhere else, and that, coupled with the rinse and repeat phrases and images prevalent in so many of these texts, makes the medium something that I am endlessly fascinated with. 

Much of my work explores the pervasive idea of the ‘American Dream’ and the performative strive for those ideals clashes with the reality of day-to-day life. How has the constant propagandistic media surrounding these concepts affected this generation? How can these goals be achieved with the current state of the world? Was this dream ever achievable? Does it even matter? If we don’t get to decide what a “good life” is, perhaps these decisions have been made for us decades before we were even born — and our only option is to live with it.