My work centers on record-keeping and exploring the shifting boundaries of self-portraiture within digital culture, where identity is mutable and fragmented. I investigate how digital environments challenge traditional notions of self, using online culture, American identity, humor, and fantasy to subvert dominant narratives and explore themes including digital cloning, death, faith, and bodily autonomy.
Much of my practice revolves around an ongoing desire to understand, define, and reclaim the use and ownership of my body and identity, an inherently unstable and ever-shifting endeavor, particularly in a world where the line between physical and virtual selves continues to blur. The space between the real and the digital serves not only as a subject of inquiry but also as a medium in itself. In this hybrid zone, I examine constructed alter egos, fragmented personas, and visual reductions of my existence through avatars, masks, and symbolic gestures that both reveal and obscure. These manifestations appear across a wide range of media, including video, sound, writing, sculpture, and immersive installation, each offering different ways of examining presence and erasure, embodiment and detachment.
A central tension in my work lies in the juxtaposition of the physical body and its digital replication—two versions of the self that coexist and yet often conflict. Through this interplay, I explore how these forms engage with one another, whether through acts of tenderness and desire or through aggression, alienation, and violence. I am particularly drawn to themes of devotion and submission, and how these are historically embedded in both religious iconography and contemporary digital behaviors. Drawing from art history and religious symbolism, I frequently reference and reinterpret bodily markings—such as stigmata, wounds, or gestures of mortification as a way to interrogate the aestheticization of suffering and the politics of piety.
This fixation may stem from my own complex relationship with Christianity. Though I was born into it, I often feel like an outsider looking in—both repelled by and fascinated with its rituals, symbols, and promises. The mark of obedience, in this context, feels at once foreign and deeply familiar. It becomes a metaphor not only for spiritual longing, but also for the broader human desire to belong, to be recognized, and to be transformed.
Through objects of reverence, installations, and digital worlds, I build intimate, surreal spaces that function as sanctuaries and mirrors, projecting imagined utopias where identity is fluid. However, these spaces can shift from sanctuary to uncanny, exposing the tensions in trying to escape reality through fantasy.
Ultimately, my work is a continual negotiation with systems that are religious, cultural, digital—that seek to define or claim ownership over the self. By resisting fixed narratives and embracing multiplicity, contradiction, and performance, I strive to carve out spaces of autonomy, reflection, and devotion within a world that increasingly demands conformity and surveillance.