Hometown/currently based out of?

I grew up in Arizona and wandered around the west coast and southwest before setting roots in Denver.

 

What song is on repeat for you?

Nunca Tristes by RENEE. I’m on a real female Spanish pop music kick if anyone wants to send me recommendations in that genre.

 

If you had to choose one food/meal to eat forever, what would it be?

Spicy mac & cheese

 

What tools do you use to create your art?

Exact-o knife, Loctite brand gel-control superglue, Elmers glue stick, books, magazines, and Photoshop.

If you had to choose one: desert, mountains or ocean?

I oscillated between these for a number of years while semi-nomadic. The desert is my origin and my home but ultimately I chose mountains.

 

Are you more of  a morning person or a night owl and why?

Morning person, but sometimes I get hyper-focused on a project and embrace the night-owl life for a few days or weeks at a time.

 

What advice would you give your younger self?

Trust yourself. If something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t. It’s ok to be selective about who you spend your time with. I definitely subscribe to the adage that you are the combination of the people you associate with most.

What is the best compliment you have received about your work?

When people laugh. When someone sees my work then shares moments of humor and levity about the dark stuff or the strangeness of the human body.

 

Can you share with our readers a little bit about how you first started with this type of art?

It was 10 years ago that I first had a comedic creative impulse to buy porn and collage with it. I was 19 and living in a house with a rotating door of eccentric creatives and it was funny to leave the collages throughout the house for people to find.

It was only when people started making comments and assumptions that I was ‘really into porn’ that I started thinking about why I was making these collages. I hated looking at porn. It made me really uncomfortable, but I liked the process of transforming it into something different.

The first time I walked into a truck-stop in rural northern Arizona to buy a pornography magazine, I had been in the middle of a trauma-based created writing course. In those classes I would sit and listen to one story after another of my peer’s horrific experiences with sexual assault. It started off as a cathartic class, but by the end it was just so heavy and heartbreaking.

I felt such a lack of agency at that time. Bad things could happen to myself or people I loved and there was nothing I could do about it. I realized collaging was a way for me to decontextualize and desexualize the images. I could exercise agency and control over the images that were upsetting, and turn them into something harmless, funny, beautiful, whatever.

After a while though, I started questioning the pornographic sources I was using. I wondered what it meant to collage as a form of healing sexual trauma using images from an industry polluted with sexual abuse itself. I researched abuse in the porn industry, the difference between exploitative and ethical porn, and decided to start sourcing my images differently.

I now use images that are donated directly to me. It’s important that I know that the person in the image has given it completely consensually.

What do you believe is so powerful about the artform of collage?

That it’s inherently collaborative. It’s not about creating something from scratch like in drawing and painting. It’s about collecting, curating, and combining things that already exist. I have to work within these restrictions and parameters.

It’s like a creative practice of the serenity prayer. “To accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can…” Not that cutting and pasting is ‘courageous’ but it’s the idea of working with what is in front of you. It’s a reminder to accept your circumstances, your past, your shortcomings, and focus efforts into the things in life you do have control over.

 

How have you found people can use art as a form of therapy (as the creator vs the viewer)?

As a creator it’s been therapeutic to just follow my creative impulses and sometimes a deeper driving force reveals itself after the fact. I had started collaging because these strange collages were funny to me, and it was only through people’s reactions and deeper reflection that I realized I was working through something.

As a viewer I sometimes experience this euphoric state of ‘awe’ when I see a piece that really excites, confuses or intrigues me. Tapping into that state of wonder is very cathartic.

Can you walk us through your process a bit, how do you design your collages?

An ideal collage will mix both analog (physical/handcut) and digital collage. I’ll start with magazines and books. I like avant garde/ emerging artist fashion magazines like ‘Hunger’ for figures and patterns. Then I have a collection of nature-based images, and miscellaneous stuff like this book that’s a collection of really gorgeous bridges.

I also have digital images of people’s bodies that have been donated to the artwork.

I’ll mess around with analog materials (magazines, books, etc) , scan or take pictures of what I make, then manipulate it and combine it and collage digitally.

The digital stage is where I get really obsessed with symmetry. Most of my work is mandala inspired where things develop out from the center using mirroring and symmetry.

I’m also now at a stage where I have a graveyard of printed digital collages that I’m analog collaging with. So I get to hand make new analog collages with the printed digital ones, then throw it back in digital form, back to analog, in an endless loop.

Can you tell us about the Celebrating the Body exhibition?

‘Celebrating the Body’ is an art show & fundraiser showcasing artwork, live music, live painting, and a ‘nude donation station’ where attendees may donate an image of their body to artwork that raises money for survivors of sexual assault.

There’s limitations to where I can show my work so I realized I would have to create those opportunities myself. It’s a chance to show work that I cannot show in most venues, but also a chance to connect with and showcase other artists.

I curated the first ‘Celebrating the Body’ art show a few years ago and had so much fun curating the other artwork I actually forgot to show my own.

June 14th will be a night to gather, honor, explore, and celebrate the human body while raising money for survivors of sexual assault.

What has been the most fulfilling part for you about the work you are creating?

The conversations and connections I get to have with people. Sometimes it’s overwhelming or inappropriate, but mostly I get to have these really interesting, funny, authentic conversations.

The human body is so weird and wonderful, and we all have very unique relationships with our body, but there’s also a lot of shared universal stuff.

 

What message do you hope the viewer perceives from your art?

I hope to encourage people to ‘celebrate the body’. Our relationship with our body is the one true constant in life. Our bodies grow and change and age and experience traumas and triumphs. It is weird and beautiful and worth celebrating.