ARTIST STATEMENT: I am an artist who was trained in the social sciences. As such, I view my creative practice as a visual ethnography, an investigation into the untold complexities of the lived experience. My artwork expresses multifaceted narratives about human relations and emotional conditions. I work across mediums— utilizing paint, collage, and mixed media interchangeably. Through this media, I construct bizarre and comedic scenes densely layered with psychosocial content. My pieces depict figures, animals, and symbology rooted in a specific location. Referencing elements of oral history, ethnography, and personal narrative, my artwork does not replicate the literalism of the physical world. Instead, these pieces give expression to a uniquely individualized reality, a personal brand of magical realism. I then relate these stories within a greater framework of social power structures. My interest is to balance interior subjectivity within the external world of constructed hierarchies.