Susanna

Text on Method 1st Draft (March 20 2013)

Gently subversive and often desire-driven, my work is part rational critique part emotional homage. Often focusing on the idea of the obsessive archive and its subsequent sentimentalities, through my practice I aim to confront popular and personal histories with both humour and sincerity, following the lives of ideas rather than focusing on simply the start or the finish. Most recently these concerns have manifested themselves in bodies of work that are linked by their dealings with the idea of idiosyncratic collections inspired by various iterations of the everyday.

One subject that comes up often in my work is that of a popular or public grief, which in the past I have used to sort through my own sadness or trauma. This is evident in two works, in which I comb various corners of popular culture for hints of feeling. Country War Songs is a small songbook printed in red, white and blue that contains the lyrics to contemporary country war songs written post 9/11.

This notion of the archive is taken up again in several current, ongoing works. In Contenders, I continue to collect screenshots from the last episode of every season of popular reality TV dating show The Bachelor, each image depicting the moment when the losing of the final two women is told she is not The One. Ranging from grief-stricken to angry to humiliated, the women of Contenders play with the public/private notions of heartache, resisting the joke while telling it themselves. In You Are All I’ve Loved, I am completing life-size monochromatic portraits of my past lovers according to my synesthetic associations with their person, distilling memory to a single chromatic essence as a way of untangling and dealing with sadness in a manageable way

I don't like to be so serious, I like to make art about things that I like. Things that peak my interest and often that is coming in from this outside world that includes pop culture and a cute puppy on the street, or I was recently talking to an artist and he said that if you feel like you're embarrassed, or you feel like you're laughing nervously, you're feeling a little bit unsure of an idea that you're having that's a very good place to start. I think that humour and embarrassment are sort of linked and that's something that I think about and value. I came from this city where the work that was being made was very cool and devoid of feeling and emotion, very academic and I think that I’ve been reacting to that in sort of a slow way, but its definitely there.

I used to think I was making fun-- but looking back, it was just an excuse. Now I realize I am simply making art about things I like.