Artwork

Through visual art, I have broken my silence and hit my stride in depicting other issues that come with loving someone of the same sex openly.

• "Imagine having a secret desire and needing to invent a language to talk about it even to yourself. Imagine especially valuing truth over lies and finding it unacceptable both to deny one's desire and identity, and to live in a world in which it was so systematically erased and punished that there was no other way to state this desire/identity even to yourself but in a secret code." - Check, E and Lampela, L, From Our Voices, Art Educators and Artist Speak Out About Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trandgendered Issues (2003)

Safe art was my beginning. I made photographs that were simple and mimicked what I saw in my heterosexual society. Historically there are many photographers that based their own works on the beautiful landscape. I look back now and relate the need for the landscape as my own search for my place in life. I've grown up with a common sense of home and knowing where that place is. I'm on the verge of that sense of home deteriorating literally and figuratively due to family illness and deciding the inevitable moment of choosing to be open with my family.

My current work has given me room to experiment with my views, thoughts, and concerns about how "queerness" is documented, reviewed and subjected in society. I've been timidly labeling myself as a lesbian artist. As an emerging lesbian artist, I realize that I make the choice not to exhibit my work anywhere near a place it might come in close contact of a member of my family. I would also be uncomfortable teaching in a town where I could not be compelled to advocate for my beliefs that conflict with my family's belief system. With that said however, I do not shy away from making, discussing, and exhibiting my work in any other part of the United States. In many way, the appalling lack of Queer representation in schools, galleries, museums and other social public spaces and the lack of understanding the importance of Queer artists and histories is, to say the least, needing to be recognized. My work can be categorized as a means to mitigate that factor and add dynamic dialogue to the existing discourse.

The mainstream network of individuals advocating for the most recent Queer representation has focused on non-discriminatory rights for "gays to get married". Is the constitution the "place" to define marriage between one man and one woman? If divorce were scrutinized as much as same sex marriage has been this past year, then would the President of the United States (1) be so adamant about proposing a constitutional amendment? I see hypocrisy in today's political environment; selfish individuals that authoritatively condemn what is not their own. I see others defining and packaging their detached interpretation in order to visibly show people shaking their heads in agreement, which denotes understanding, to an issue/topic that they have not investigated themselves. I have issue with "followers" that do not know what they are following or don't seem to want to know why they are following. The knowledge structure and academic system should not be based solely on my "mythical norm, white....male....heterosexual..."(2) but I believe it should be open to all variations of the norm as defined by society.

With eager anticipation I predict that my art making will contest the repression that I have placed on myself and that I have faced in my life. This emotion I believe represents that advocate, feminist, independent woman that came from female family influences. Indirectly I now see how my early childhood experiences and influences came to direct my path as a lesbian and as an artist.

(1) At the time of my original writing Pres. George W. Bush was in office.

(2) "The Next Generation; Lesbian Learning/Learning Lesbian", Check, E and Lampela, L, From Our Voices, Art Educators and Artist Speak Out About Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trandgendered Issues (2003)