I have always been interested in the way we perceive, as well as project ourselves and others. I like to think of our minds as a prism, where input is refracted, and in turn, changes direction and alters what is projected. The input is comprised of ideologies that have been fed to us through popular culture and exhibition. Exhibitions tell us how things and cultures look, and the visuals we are fed are shallow and watered down stereotypes. More recently I began researching the early American circus and its adverse, and long lasting effects, on the way it packaged cultures and displayed people. The circus served as a platform to distort the public's view of other cultures by passing them off as the "most educational shows on earth." In researching this, I began to explore circus and sideshow methodologies for altering the publics view. I found that we are easily swayed and influenced by the input we receive, whether the ideas are blatant or inconspicuous we gobble it up just the same.
My objective as an illustrator is to project that output, those scrambled ideas, back into the prism in an effort to correct and solidify them once again in a concise way. My intention is to use the very same methodologies used to skew our views, to correct them. I do this by asking myself a simple question, what would our predisposed ideologies that have been tightly packaged look like, if they were also tightly packaged? I answer this question using a variety of media, to present the viewers with their own gaze.
