MetroColorCollision, Oakland, CA, Let's Bolt, Again, January 2008

Flux Factory, New York, NY, Secret Clubhouse, 2007

Berlin Kunst Projekt, Berlin, Germany, sCaPeS: A Binocular Experience, January 2004

Treehouse Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Yo, Kid It's In The Bag, June 2003

Capitol Studios, Los Angeles, CA, Grapheme, April 2003

UBS Studios, Red Hook, NY, doomp doomp doomp, May 2002

bio:

I have been making art since I was, um, well, forever! As a child, I was obsessed with the impressionists: degas’s ballerinas, Renoir (I loved that hula hoop girl nestled among all the blue umbrellas) and cezanne, not to mention children’s book greats like Barbara cooney (miss rumphius) or red grooms (Rembrandt Takes a Walk) and of course Kay Fender/Philippe Dumas (Odette- a bird in paris) about the little bird and elderly frenchman’s tender friendship.

At 10, I met and fell in love with feminist artist hollis sigler at her show at my local museum in utica, ny (mwpi). her playful colors and strange narrative i found utterly alluring, though probably didn't understand the content. At 12 I had visited monet's giverny. At 13 I was copying Arthur dove's abstract modernist paintings. I was a romantic! somewhere along the way i developed teenage angst, spending hours in the artroom at school, even cutting classes to be in the artroom. Spending summers taking painting and drawing, experimental sculpture and printmaking, mentally escaping my humdrum utica, ny.

Eventually i made it to bard college (after a one year stint in norton, massachusetts) where i studied fine arts in the natural beauty that is the hudson valley. bard was a strange and wonderful place (not to mention it was steely dan's old school, among others). it opened me up to the world of art in a way i hadn't previously been exposed. i studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. My last year there was an independent study where i spent every waking hour in my studio, stuck inside my head, gearing up for my first big exhibition. it was titled "doomp doomp" and consisted of 2 floor to ceiling walls covered in my paintings, depicting singular thoughts and sketches taken from my many notebooks and then kinetic carlike sculptures that clumsily drove around the space.

believe it or not, the night after my show's opening, my year of dedicated heartfelt work was destroyed by some local teenagers who apparently broke into the building and thought it amusing to ransack the place which included my clumsy kinetic "cars". i discovered them overturned like dead beetles, stripped of their handmade mechanisms, gutted. sad. in a daze of not sleeping properly for a year and the emotional stress of seeing my hard work treated so irreverently, i then thoroughly destroyed the crippled cars, trampling them beyond repair. i couldn't bear the thought of toiling over their delicate inner workings in an attempt to get them back in working order. and for the next several years i decided to not let my art become too precious. for my next several shows, when i covered the walls in drawings or kinetic sculpture, i failed to document or save any of it. this was giant step for a pack-rat who used to collect shopping bags, fortune cookie fortunes, matchbooks, and other useless things. admittedly, i regret at least not getting good documentation.

In 2002, i graduated from bard and drove to the west coast, ending in los angeles. it seemed so far away, so mysterious and surreal. my intention was to move there for a few months until i figured out what i really wanted to do. i don't know if we ever really figure that out. well, los angeles is a powerful place. it really takes hold of you somehow. maybe it is all the sun? the unchanging weather? my desire to understand and conquer a new place? whatever it was, it kept me occupied for 5 years. i met my boyfriend (born and raised in eagle rock, ca) there and we eventually saved enough money to make the trek back to the east coast. i am very happy to be back in ny.