I AM HERE

Within this multifaceted role as an artist, director, and sometimes performer, I have found that the ability to formulate ideas and execute them is not limited to socially constructed ideals of disability. Dealing with the inaccessibility of multiple facilities and transitioning from a power chair to a manual chair, has changed my ideas of photographies construction and its 2 dimensional plain of existence. I thought that if I can transition, I also can transform and create art that hovers within the realms of sculpture, photography, and installation. I want to ambiguate the idea of the image in photography. While changing the way people look and think about photography by forcing it into the third dimension. Which forms a new language between the image, object-hood, collage, and the architecture that it creates and inhabits as an installation. At this point of exploration, I use the pliability of a print to accentuate the forms within the photograph. By allowing the materials to bend, fold, curl, and droop in unconventional ways to create new ways of experiencing a photograph. Choosing images that deal with identity, disability, physical access, and persona. I created a new architecture to transform the space and create a directed art viewing experience that warrants a careful examination.

Using vinyl, large format printing and collage I take over space with the portrait of a power wheelchair as an object and its fiery destruction. On the continued path there are large format photographs of my inability to access bathrooms that are labeled handicapped accessible, which is combined with the sexualization of the disabled female body. All of these different areas of collage emanating the idea that "I Am Here" and you, the viewer, are going to reexamine your perceptions of who and what I am. By using offensive language that was found on Wikipedia's list of derogatory terms for people with disabilities, I adhered them to my body and own them as a rejection of their perceived truths.

Showing my body out of its wheelchair and within the traditional boudoir photographies dissection of the female form, I break down the stereotype that nullifies the sexuality of the disabled body. By highlighting it’s sexuality through the use of lingerie and the powerful color red, depicting myself as a woman whose identity goes beyond the wheelchair and my disability. Using the fake tattooed body as a persona who performs without any facial identity.