Color, Balance: Happiness is just a spray away

This work is part of my series “Color, Balance” where bodily artifacts removed from fashion photography become the base for paintings I create in Photoshop. I add subtle layers of digital paint and push pixels to blend the figure’s remnants into the background. I use color as a spatial feature, shifting away the boundary of the body to further blur lines between abstraction and figuration. In response to the growing demands of the screen, I strive to balance the off-kilter relationship between digital and physical space. One aspect of this practice involves drawing attention to dysmorphia in the beauty industry. Titles for pieces such as “No cookie-cutter” and “You’ve lost all of my shape” often come from workplace comments about photographs I have edited. They point to the pernicious absurdity of the mutable digital body. An aspect of my practice engages the use of computer software that removes all traces of my hand— the process iterates the disappearance of the physical body on and off the screen. With this work, I aim to express the complexity of 21st-century identity, and the disconnect between the body and those around us. Physical works from this series where shown at my solo exhibition “I Am A Portrait” at Undercurrent, Brooklyn in January 2020.