My mother has Alzheimer’s (they say I look like her)
acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60" |
Artist
Statement
As a lesbian and a mother I am both inside and outside societal
acceptance – my lesbianism makes me the object of derision
and discrimination while my status as Mother places me inside a
Norman Rockwell painting, a cherished, yet belittled object.
As a result I find myself ideally situated to comment on "normative
behavior" and the shadow-world of life and death behind it.
My paintings view the complexities of everyday life from a "side
door" of the house, using humor and irony to probe such topics
as birth, sexual objectification, motherhood and disease. My goal
is coax the viewer into rethinking the norm, to tunnel into the
underground labyrinth of everyone’s private world. Sometimes
I use words in juxtaposition to an image, "Incest?" for
example, above the image of young girl in a girl scout uniform.
This narrative acts as a catalyst, destabilizing the image and opening
up a colloquy that revolves around the contradictions between accepted
public images and their often hidden truths.
In addition, I use the techniques of a subjugated and often neglected
class – children – painting flat cartoons to create modern
icons of our private world.
As a woman and as a mother I find my experience is often not present
in the art gallery but I find it when I visit Target. As a lesbian
I face a double disappearance, as a lesbian mother it may be that
I begin to cross so many categories that I disintegrate. Sometimes
I think of my life as a series of boxes, some overlap, others exclude
each other. In the mommy box my individual identity disappears.
I become one with all of the mommies who populate my mommy life
and at the same time I disappear as a mommy. Women may be finally
taken as serious people, but when they admit to being a mother they
become identified with children, thrust into the domestic box from
which they are not allowed to speak. One of the most pernicious
forms of discrimination is literal disappearance. But as an artist
I take form again. Head, feet, hands appear. And as I work in my
studio I have not forgotten the morph-like journey I have just made.
I am true to my tribe … and I paint from the mommies’
point of view.
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