The artistic projects I pursue are a reflection of my complex relationship with the American West. They explore what it means to be an American in a time of diminished expectations. Working as a lens-based artist, I utilize the landscape symbolically to address issues of power, gender, and eco-anxiety. I perform for the camera, enacting feminist gestures that reflect a sense of quixotic hopefulness as well as a desire for control over subjects as ungovernable as nature. I photograph myself attempting to grasp the sun and I physically manipulate images of the landscape by scratching them until a void is generated. These actions have a direct link to my personal history: I grew up in southern Arizona, immersed in vast landscapes and surrounded by cliché representations of my own experiences. There were cowboys riding bulls, coyotes howling on moonlit nights, and monumentally beautiful sunsets. I’ve translated those experiences into epic photographs and playfully antagonistic videos.

The gestures that I enact for the camera are simultaneously loving and cruel; they are an attempt to discuss the frustration inherent in contemporary experience. I make photographs in which I confront the American landscape and foolheartedly demand that it become aware of my presence. I make videos in which I break through images and leave the viewer to contemplate traces of representation. I transform photographic materials through the act of touch. The photographs, installations, performances, and videos that I produce acknowledge the possibility of failure, that I will go unnoticed, and that I won’t affect any change. It is through these projects that I attempt to contend with the inevitable and express the need for agency. I become a sympathetic hero and a stand-in for the viewer as I face the sublime and call its power into question.