Even though my work doesn't have a landscape, it's usually people with nothing around them.
I grew up in Salt Lake City, or Murray, Utah,
and I wanted to be an artist from the time I was really young.
I think when I was probably in the second or third grade,
I told my parents I wanted to be a Disney animator.
I think probably because that was one of the only ways I knew you could be an artist.
We always had art books around.
My parents had a lot of classical art, like we had a book on Michelangelo and all these things,
and I was just obsessed with them.
I would look at them all the time, and I would draw from them.
I made art from the time I was really little, and I knew that's kind of what I wanted to do.
I took a lot of myth classes.
My mom teaches in the language and literature, and she studies classics.
We just had a lot of books about myth and storytelling and reading,
and storytelling has always been really big in my family.
Those classes really interested me, and I think that's worked its way into my work.
I definitely use narrative a lot and referencing traditional stories
or themes that crop up in multiple cultures.
That plays a big part.
I love classes on evolution and the environment and animals,
and those show up in my work, but I don't know if that's because of those or living in Salt Lake.
There's a lot of artists from Utah that make not just traditional landscape work,
but work where the landscape plays an important role.
Even though my work doesn't have a landscape, like it's usually people with nothing around them,
I think that the vastness of that space really does reference the landscape here.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and it's like a silly theory,
but I keep testing it out on people.
What do you think?
People who grow up in spaces like Utah, like Salt Lake,
where you can easily get up above everything man-made.
We can go to the mountains.
I think whenever people talk about tourism in Utah, I always hear this like,
you can be in nature in 15 minutes, but it's not just that you can be in nature.
It's that you can be up above everything that man has made in this valley,
and you can see it completely dwarfed by not just the mountains that are bigger than everything,
but the vastness of the land stretching around and the sky,
and that it makes me feel small.
I can imagine that somebody grows up in a city where the city is huge,
and there's nothing bigger than their buildings, and there's nothing bigger than that human-made space,
would have a very different perception of their place in the world.
So I think that that shows up in my work because the people are always so small within their environment.
Even if their environment has nothing in it, they're still small.
They're kind of insignificant in that space.
For the past two and a half years, I've been the exhibitions coordinator for the book arts and for the library,
and that's been really interesting as far as coordinating with artists and helping lay out a show,
and so I get to have work on the small, personal stuff,
and also realize these much bigger installations that I wouldn't necessarily do on my own with my own work,
and so my work is kind of like usually there's a lot of finicky things that have to be installed,
so that's been helpful.
So I applied for a show, a two-person show with Cara de Spain at KO Gallery,
and we decided that we wanted to transform the entire gallery space,
so our goal was to really make as much work for ourselves as possible.
We didn't want to just hang drawings or do any of that.
We wanted to have paper installation and drawings and really play with the light in the space,
and so that was my first experience of producing an entire show's worth of work,
and that kind of informed how I've thought about every show since.
More recently, I've been doing these slide projector pieces,
and so they are kind of just like one piece,
but the slide projectors themselves are these like old machines,
and they hum and they glow and they smell like burning dust,
and so they have a personality and they have to sit on a podium,
and then there's all that space between where they sit and what they're projecting to,
and the way that that light projects, all of that space is filled with something,
and so I like that, and then of course the clicking and the interactive quality
that somebody's coming in and having to interact with it or turn the page.
I mean, I always try to like that first show, again, we set a pretty high standard
because we created all these videos that we put out where there were silly videos
to create hype about the show and also just to show the process,
because I think if you don't make art or you are not around it all the time,
it can seem kind of mysterious or sort of be romantic, and it's not,
it's like dirty and silly, and there's just, you know,
so we wanted to kind of lift the veil from that.
I taught like a book making drawing workshop where a lot of,
I think it's interesting that drawing is something that all little kids do,
and they are so free with it and they'll draw anything,
and they're like so proud of their drawings,
and I don't know what happens to people, but once they get to a certain age,
everyone is ashamed of their drawing, like people are like,
I can't draw, as if it's like there's a standard
and we all suddenly understood that there was a standard
and we're so embarrassed of our inability to meet that standard.
So I wanted to do this workshop where you like do blind contour drawings
so that people, participants came in and they had to not look at what they were doing
and just look at the thing they were drawing and draw without looking,
to try to break that like, that self-conscious barrier down.
And it was successful, it was really interesting that the kids that came in,
like loved that, they got that right away,
and then a lot of the adults really enjoyed it too,
but it kind of took them a little bit longer.
I just, I have some things that I want to just figure out in my art practice
that I don't, they're sort of like little starter ideas
and I want to see how they progress,
and usually a show is really a good way to motivate me to make something,
but I think that this is not the project for that,
like I need time to like figure out how to do it,
and I just want time to do that.
So I'm trying not to take on too much stuff.
Just take it easy.
That's it.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
