"White Noise"

As with most of my artwork the development of the content in the work (the meaning, the stuff between the lines) often goes hand in hand with the making of the work. That was definitely true with the work I did for my thesis. I started my MFA in 2016 which marked the beginning of this period of social and political upheaval that we find ourselves in. I had a choice to make at that point about how I would allow that to affect my work. My thoughts and personal life were suffused with the strife over the issues that are represented in my work. In a way there wasn’t anything else to make my work “about” during this period. What I managed to achieve in the end with this body of work was a blending of my personal relationship to the people and issues associated with this time period, and the issues which intruded on, and warped those personal relationships.

The title of the thesis “white noise” is a pun. It also alludes to the amount of static that stands in for communication these days. In most of my work there is a layer of something that blurs, distorts, hides, or transforms imagery that we take for granted. These are images that we are inundated with, be they talking-head media personalities, historical markers, family photos, or the numerous historical sites that we live near and around. This layer that we add to our personal and collective sense of who we are and where we come from is something that says more about our individual hopes and fears than it does about any historical or societal reality. My hope is that work like my thesis can be a moment of critical reflection on the destruction wrought by some of these recent narratives we tell ourselves about who we are.