Grown inside of Harmony Korine’s fucked up world of “GUMMO” (1997) theSe wearable sculptures are the TORNADOS, COWBOYS, BUNNYS AND THE GIRLS WHO RAISE THEM ALL. The work is dedicated to all those who have died daring to be exactly who they are, all those people that go screaming, that go laughing, that go way too soon. Hiding but screaming at the same time, refusing to be silenced while protecting one’s self. These things you wear on your body have the personalities of the characters who they are named after embedded in them. I am making the wearer an escape route out of the straight and narrow. I invite you to play dress up in my junkyard, just be careful i think my brain threw up in there.
I make clothes 4 Bad Kidz that want to run barefoot through the fields of technicolor garbage. The work is not shy and the wearer rarely is either but there is always room for vulnerability. This clothing is not made to be looked at, it’s made to trample through adventures in. I am in the business of turning waste into want, and humans can not function without either.
I have a serious conflict of interests existing inside of me. For every inch of my work that is informed by the acid candy cartoons we watched as kids, there is a mile of muddy virginia creek water to swim through to contextualize my work. Growing up picking up trash from the local river walk established a need to collect other people’s garbage and do something with it. This process of art forming out of street scavenging takes after my mother but looks to legendary skate heros like Jason DILL and Mark Gonz who transform found imagery to tell whatever they see in and through the dirt. All of these childhood urges influence and mix with the support, expansion, and eventual explosion of my queer life through the introduction into the Chicago drag scene.
