photo credit: Kath Poehler

I am interdisciplinary visual artist and educator. My work addresses topics at the intersection of sociology, architecture and visual art. Themes such as home, labor, culture and perceived binaries are examined through materiality and process.

Our family home is 15 miles outside of Philadelphia’s center, in a former steel mill town where European immigrants of the early 1900s settled. In the mid 1950s my Italian-American grandfather remodeled this 3- story family house into a multi-use structure that serves as home and a family-run business. The smells of perm solution and fresh tomato gravy have mingled for four generations. Still today, only 3 steps separate the handcrafted hair salon from our kitchen table.

I am consumed with hidden and exposed structure, both architectural and social. My investigation of physical construction, cultural constructs and their relationship originates from the framework most familiar to me, the house in which I grew up.

I merge painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture and installation to create two and three-dimensional artwork that deconstructs and recreates this space. There is an emphasis on memory as I adhere, carve and chip away at wallpaper, plywood, drywall, paneling and objects. Patterns are interrupted and fall apart.

Through materiality and process a sense of fluidity between feminine and masculine, public and private and modern and traditional is relayed. The physical layering of materials alludes to the emblematic layers of people and to the layers that comprise the immigrant culture over time. The work is a map of comprehension. By peeling away the facades and breaking the constructs my intention is to question the systems that are accepted and perpetuated as normal, cast away the prescribed and free the spirit of the individual.