this is an intention statement for the website documenting the St. Mary's College Studio Art Senior Project / SMP (there's 8 of us). please feel free to comment or criticize, this is definitely always a work in progress. i know it isn't perfect or completely comprehensive, but i am pretty proud of it.

"American society and culture, as a whole, has been constructed in terms of opposition. Life opposes death, pain opposes pleasure, the other opposes the self, Heaven opposes Hell. Our desire to categorize ourselves, others, and human experience has spiraled entirely out of control; one cannot speak, cannot act, cannot think without being categorized into a system of dualities. Admittedly, within this specific cultural context, many of my aesthetic creations could be described as dark, disturbing, or disconcerting art, and my body of work could easily be misunderstood as morbid. However, my aim is to constructively disturb the viewer in order to underscore the essential subjectivity of these culturally established dichotomies and categories. We have alienated ourselves and each other through an excessive devotion to oppositional relationships, and my goal is to remedy that.
In my work, I use cultural icons and representations in order to question the categories within which they are traditionally placed. My goal is to turn emblems of life into emblems of death and vice versa. I explore many dichotomies from suffering and pleasure, to life and death, to the beautiful and the grotesque. These role reversals act as a reminder that we, as human beings, constantly divide ourselves, others, and human experience. I attempt to reconcile these oppositions into one valuable, complete whole in order to inspire an appreciation of all human beings and all experiences. By recognizing that human beings and human experiences are subjectively categorized, we can begin to appreciate ourselves and each other once again. Absolute good and absolute bad would no longer apply, and human beings would be free to simply exist and appreciate the entirety of the world. If we reconcile these dualities, we can, in turn, more freely empathize with the experience of other human beings without feeling the need to objectify and categorize those around us as “good” or “bad.”
The ultimate goal of my work, then, is to dissolve the concept of ultimate dichotomy in order to reintroduce a wider appreciation of human experience into the minds of my audience. Reducing human beings to a representation of a category positions the self against the other, creates self-loathing, and results inevitably in suffering. By eliminating oppositional constructs we can begin to reconstruct our conception of human experience, and we can recognize the essential interconnectivity of human nature. We can be free to empathize, to be compassionate, and to forgive ourselves and others when we fail to live up to the relentless and unattainable ideal of the “good” character.
Of course, the human impulse to categorize and assert the truth of those oppositional relationships can never be entirely eliminated. Language itself inherently necessitates categorization and the creation of oppositional relationships, and I have fallen prey to it in this very essay. However, it is crucial for one to realize that these categories are neither inherently “true” nor are they ultimate; they are subjective and fluid constructs created by subjective and fluid human beings."