Artist Statement

In order to explore more abstract disciplines of photography we as a class have

endeavored to create joiners and collages as inspired by David Hockney, which are meant
to draw the eye and grant importance to every inch of a photograph, enthralling the
audience rather than being three-second eye candy. This project will express a complex
personal aspect of my life, my family, through objects compounded in a joiner.

One of the most important symbols in this joiner is the sun on the vanity, a close look at
the painting on the sun will show town's people going through their daily lives
underneath the kind face of the nearest star, a giant socked foot amongst their midst. This
decoration was given to me by my father upon his return from Mexico years ago and
represents the return of normalcy. The sun is my father, the towns people are my family,
the socked foot is a representation of the struggles we have overcome and a reminder of
the ones we have yet to encounter. You will notice that a basket, a box of watercolors, and
a palette is repeated multiple times in the joiner. The basket is gleaming- waiting but the
box is hardly distinguishable, and the paint in the palette is cracked and dry. Despite its
importance, given its repetition, the paints lay ignored and unused. My father always said
we were a family of artists- he designs flyers, logos, decals for a living, his sister is a
tattoo artist, his niece owns a paint body shop for automobiles- and so these disused art
supplies represent turbulent family ties, in a home where the good of the whole is
centerfold, connections are running dry. Lastly, the guardian angel watching over two
children as they cross a violent river. As a young girl I used to look on this statue and put
myself in the place of the little girl leading her brother across the depths and resolved
myself to be a steady dependable presence to them so that they may never have to pitch
over the side of the rickety bridge. As a kid I figured Id have a guardian angel to help
me, and though I have abandoned such notions, the statue reminds me of the people I
have placed under my responsibility- from house to house, room to room, crack after
crack, the statue remains.

The creation of this project was sparked by the realization that if I were to photograph my
family for hours and hours and days and days, I would not be able to capture the sense of
family that we all share. We exist together but are not intertwined, we fight amongst our
own often but are ready to jump off a cliff for each other at a moment's notice. A joiner of
the ambience would be either overtly cheerful- in the moments when we stop coexisting
and truly come together- or cold- when we take a step back and scatter to our own
separate corners of the world, when collisions are straddling the thin line between
chirping and throwing punches. Our family has the tendency to move around every
couple of years, so there is no history in these walls- the only things we have are the
objects we have deemed worth keeping by sentimental or practical means. Luckily my
vanity has become a display for all sort of sentimental knick knacks over the years and
opens up a small window into the subtleties that rule over our everyday lives, which I
have chosen to share with you. From Norman Rockwells Freedom From Want to our
kindergarten finger paintings, I bring you: family.

The most influential artist when creating my joiner was David Hockneys The Desk,
which inspired me to represent me and my family through objects on a vanity. His
method has allowed me to portray them in a way that makes every inch important.