Artist Statement

I am visual artist, seamstress, and programmer whose roots run deep within "geek" related pop culture. My sewing and fabrication art serve as either exact replicas of costumes and props, or design adaptations of their original forms as they appear in media. Because I spend so much time in fan-created spaces like comic and pop culture conventions, I am committed to exploring the relationship between popular culture media and the modern fan/consumer of such media. I grew up creating art and content for communities dedicated to my favorite media through writing, visual art, and cosplay and have built some of my strongest personal relationships through those endeavors. Cosplay specifically has had the biggest impact in my creative life, as it is somewhat of a family business for me. I grew up watching my aunt and uncle create, perform, and share their love for their favorite media through cosplay while making a living out of it, and it has inspired me to put my own drive toward such a creative outlet. While cosplay as a community is not necessarily young, it remains as yet unexplored in terms of public understanding. Cosplay is a microcosm of a culture in its own right and a lot of the motivation for my work comes from the desire to both share that culture with the public and analyze certain controversial topics and social stratifications within the cosplay community. A good deal of my inspiration for my art comes from the video game industry. I personally believe that video games are the most comprehensive forms of art: a perfect combination of narrative, music, acting, design, and visual art all with the added bonus of user interactivity. I believe that video games have the greatest opportunity as art to impact their audience because of the unparalleled level of immersion the audience is able to experience. I have a particular fondness for earlier video games from the days of the Atari and NES in the advent of the medium in the early 80’s and take a lot of inspiration from that decade specifically. One of my goals is to use my experience to create games which are more modern and polished narratives reminiscent of games from that era.