Statement

I am a first-generation American, a Hapa, with relatives, I have never met, anchored to the islands of Japan and Newfoundland. Like dandelions seeds, my parents drifted far and willy-nilly, while their familial roots, deep and tapered, would not budge. I grew up on military bases, in small provincial towns, moving every two years; my family lugging dogs, motorcycles, and mismatched furniture back and forth, and back and forth, across this country. We were weeds.

My father was proud of being from the working-poor, from folks who were paid with groceries and signed documents with Xs. By his own accounts, he was not the best student, liked television more than books, and when I was in high school, I had to review fractions with him. He could fix anything: planes, cars, you name it. He didn’t share those skills with me, because, well, I’m a girl. In the end, he was just so tired, so worn down, by “the man” and his cynicism. “Elliott,” he called me Elliott, “every morning when I put my feet down on the ground to get up and go to work, it is a little death.”

I landed continents away from my family, in what I do, what I think, what I love, whom I love, and who I am.

Who am I?

I still can’t figure out if I am downwardly mobile or a bourgeois bohemian. I hide the fact that I have an advanced degree and wonder out loud what fine art has done for me. I can’t stand group politics, yet would be labeled a bleeding heart liberal. And if another person labels me “exotic,” I’ll give them a karate chop. My point? Obviously, I am a mixed bag when it comes to education, class, and ethnicity. And consequently, I am a hybrid artist when it comes to subject matter, medium, and language.

Due to these apparent contradictions, I am in the ritualistic process of constructing an identity—trying to align my personal experience with outer social, political, and sexual realities. In my attempt to create personal urban folk art (ala The Ramones), I use common materials and talk about everyday situations that make up a life. In general, my work deals with intimacy, power, feminine aesthetics, and human behavior. I confront embarrassing moments, unpleasant feelings, and difficult situations, while maintaining a wry humor that tempers the discomfort of my subject matter. Perhaps, this is related to my childhood obsession with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and later, my worship of John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. The images come to me as reactionary flashes to what I have heard, seen, or experienced. I literally cough them up like hair balls. Hence my work is a visual diary, brimming with suffering and sap, that rests in the space between memory and imagination. Through the use of confessing characters and tattle-tell personas I guide the viewer down a multi-layered narrative path.

Who am I?

Ambiguity and shape-shifting were planted in me as a child. I am water. Fluid and solid and air bound.

And, so are you.