I teach because I have a calling to teach. Helping my students transform their ideas into visually compelling and complete works feels just as exciting and fulfilling as my own artistic pursuits.
I want to help my students unlearn that there is an ideal they are striving for and they are only successful if their answers are ‘right’ or the same. So much of art is seeing a final product in your mind and then problem solving how to create the image. It is important to me that my students become, not only creative individuals, but also creative problem solvers.
In my current work, I am looking into the interactions between the human animal and the human intellect and close, intimate relationships between humans and animals using photographs, video, installation, and written and spoken word. I am interested in looking at human interactions, emotions, and relationships through the lens of animal behavior instead of the more common lens of psychoanalysis, a field that often separates the body and mind whereas behavior seeks to integrate the two.
Often, people try to fool themselves with the lie that humans fall somewhere outside of the physical, that our intellect pulls us out of the animal we truly are, placing the us in a category above what we believe is the ‘other.’ I hope, through my art, to investigate the idea of the self-domesticated human and the possibilities we could uncover if only left alone, to reintegrate with our physical and emotional selves. I want to construct a language, using our collective mythology and imagery, to rediscover the possibilities within the stories we build around our lives and ourselves.