Artists Against the Bomb opens Friday, October 16, 2026.
Artists Against the Bomb opens Friday, October 16, 2026.
Can you talk about your background and what brought you to the UMOCA Residency?
I originally moved to Utah for my graduate program at the University of Utah. I am a Printmaker—with a BFA in Printmaking and Poetry, and my MFA in Printmaking as well. I had started to check out the museum and came to some openings. I just really enjoyed the environment and being around the museum helped me get settled in Salt Lake. During my final year, one of my main faculty advisors—who’s a former UMOCA Artist-in-Residence—brought our seminar class to visit the studios and talk to one of the residents. Soon after, I connected with Laura [Allred-Hurtado], and on a huge leap of faith invited her to my studio and MFA thesis. She asked me so many challenging questions, and really got me thinking. So when I decided to stay in Utah after school, I felt like applying to the residency was going to be a really important next step for me.
Can you talk a bit about the trajectory of your residency here at UMOCA? Where did you start and where are you now?
I applied for this residency when I was kind of wrapping up a body of work about the horror genre and porn so I was still thinking a lot about these hypersexualized representations of women. I wanted to push in a new direction, so I had proposed looking at the gendering of AI in popular science fiction. I came in and was doing a lot of drawing, which was really nice after doing more photo-based print work. I took a lot of time on a couple of large drawings that I showed last fall, but I was still feeling so hung up on the vintage Playboys, so I shifted back to more print based work but continued focusing on that content. Every time I tried to shift toward the AI conversation, it was like I dug deeper into the Playboys. I think I began thinking about it as if Playboy was MY data-set. Like I’m the AI in this situation. So I just kept exploring that.
In the work you’re producing for your exhibition, I’d like to return this body., what drew you to engage with this specific archive [Playboy], as opposed to, say, a more digital or contemporary source of pornography? I imagine your training as a printmaker has a lot to do with this…
Definitely. There’s a kind of tactility to Playboy that I am really drawn to, and I have used the magazine to pull from for a lot of my collage work—so as an object, the magazine has been a part of my process for a while. I think my printmaking background helped me approach the magazine as an artifact, and really put emphasis on the centerfold as an object. Even the text I have used in my prints in a “ransom note” kind of style is pulled directly from the magazine and reconfigured. So there’s a physicality of the magazine that gets kept through the process, and kind of resurfaces in the final prints.
For this specific body of work, I think I got more fixated on the magazine because it’s so much more insidious than contemporary sources of pornography. Now you can hop online and see whatever you are looking for; there’s an intentionality to that. You make a decision to see it. Playboy as a magazine was a kind of gateway to porn. It was always right on the line—they had enough articles and jokes and current events that people could “buy it for the articles.” But through that “middle ground” posturing, it created a kind of neutrality that is dangerous in this context. They were able to pose themselves as a really “sex positive” and progressive entity, while leveraging women’s bodies as a powerful capitalist tool. I think I also am interested in the magazine because for people in their 30s or older, Playboy was a lot of our “first contact” with sexually explicit material. It has a really specific connotation as something that’s accessible and disposable. Which are gross adjectives in terms of what that means about the social attitude toward women.
In your exhibition statement, you mention being less interested in censoring Playboy’s imagery and more in exposing its contrived nature. Can you elaborate on how your treatment of the images you’re working with, namely your use of “erasure,” work to highlight the artificiality of these representations?
In my drawings and in my prints, I focused on getting a detailed silhouette in the process of distorting the body. When you look at a silhouette, your brain fills in the details of the body. It’s kind of a magic trick to me, because it’s simple but familiar. And it’s like so familiar, that the details end up not mattering at all—because whether the body is concealed, removed, or altered, we’ve been so inundated with this specific view of the body, that it registers to our minds.
You also write poetry, and evidence of this is apparent throughout your studio. How does text function alongside the visual elements in this particular project? More broadly, what role does poetry or text play in your studio practice as a whole?
Because the body has so many connotations, using text allows me to create a specific entry point for the work and ask more direct questions of a viewer. I know many people view the use of text as more “designerly” than “fine art” (which in my opinion is an arbitrary categorization that people use to support hierarchies in “What art is” anyway), and I’ve had feedback that I should “show, not tell” the viewer. But as a writer, I think there are just as many secrets and layers couched in language as there are in images. I tend to think about the pieces of poetry that I use more in terms of a key than a map. In my practice, I think my approach differs from many artists because I think in a combination of visuals and language. A lot of sketchbooking and ideating begins with words or descriptions of a work of art rather than a rough sketch or image. I had a studio visit recently, where the visitor joked that I have created an “office culture” in my studio because I have so many sticky notes and bulletin boards everywhere. That’s just how I think though, and keep my ideas organized.
In your statement, you mention that even before beginning this project, you were “deeply critical of this work,” concerned about the risk of inadvertently reinforcing the very narratives you aimed to deconstruct or subvert. What kinds of decisions did you make during the production and presentation of the work to navigate this tension and address that concern?
Going back to my initial proposal for my residency research, I was really interested in the idea of feminized AI. As people we are so accustomed to feminized “nurturing” that even our robots and learning programs and virtual assistants are named after women—Siri, Alexa, Cortana, etc. But those programs are largely shaped and programmed by men. (I hope that continues to change, love seeing women in STEM.) But that line of thinking began to merge with my interest in Playboy. The magazine and the empire were faced by Hugh Hefner—a man with a very specific taste for and view of women. So like these programs that are meant to perform one way, they’ve been constructed through a man’s lens of what a woman is or should be. I decided to tackle the content as my personal data-set, the lens that I learned to perform beauty and attractiveness through. Because even as an adult, who has made many choices about my appearance that distance myself from that standard, I am still impacted by it and I don’t know a woman who isn’t. So in working with my source material, I made a lot of choices to disrupt that data set. I realized that yes, I could draw the figure, and highlight the pattern by showing the same body over and over again, or I could void it. I ended up in a kind of middle-ground with the silhouettes that emphasizes the homogenous representations, but takes away a lot of the visual gratification.
You’ve spoken about grappling with the question, “Why make more of this?” in a world where “Every woman already knows this narrative.” What pushed you to move forward, and how did that self-criticism shape the final body of work?
I ultimately continued to pursue this body of work, because I liked how men responded to it with discomfort. I had a friend say, “I want to be turned on by this but it makes me uncomfortable.” So whether that is that individual’s personal experience coming to the table, or something in the work—it did something. I have always wanted to make work FOR women. When I think of my target audience, I want it to be full of women. But with this body of work, I settled into the idea of making something that leverages sex and sexuality for the purpose of a conversation. Socially, things are really tumultuous—women’s healthcare is at risk, gender affirming healthcare is at risk, LGBTQ rights are at risk. And how are we supposed to talk about the complexities within that, if we can’t even address how deeply ingrained our social attitudes about sex and bodies are, or where that comes from at the most basic level?
You’ve expressed an interest in media literacy. How do you hope viewers will engage with the Playboy imagery in your exhibition, and what questions do you hope they’ll leave with?
Part of my interest in Playboy is how normalized and accessible it has been, while still holding a kind of seedy “Dad’s porn shed” vibe. When I talk about my work with new people, nearly everyone has a memory tied to a Playboy magazine. I’ve been told stories by women whose fathers left them all over the house, as casual as a tabloid, while they were growing up and whose mothers never said a word about it, and how that taught them to view their own bodies. I’ve been told stories about how when their friend’s step-dad moved out, he left behind a trash bag full of the magazine and all the boys in the neighborhood gathered to look at them. More often than not, these experiences are a pivotal moment in the teller’s comprehension of sexuality. So I hope that when viewers look at my artwork, they have an opportunity to reflect on their own pivotal moments and awareness of sexuality. Beyond that, I hope that by putting such private material in a public setting, it recontextualizes the content enough to get viewers to examine the messaging that’s embedded within that content, and to ask questions about what the larger consequences of that messaging could be.
What’s on the horizon for you as an artist?
I am looking forward to a little break from the figure! I might draw portraits of my dog for a few weeks just to clear my head. Haha. In the immediate future, I have a Robot Print Exchange (organized by Gregory Santos) that I’m wrapping up a new print for. This summer, I am collaborating with Andrew Rice to curate an exhibition in his studio gallery Erosion. I will be showing some work at Harrington Art Studio later in the year. And in the winter, I’m co-curating an exhibition of women printmakers with Carlissa Whells for Finch Lane! I haven’t thought further out than that just yet. Through this residency, I was able to realize some of my major goals—a museum show, a new body of work, and I received an Artist Fellowship from the state. I want to take a minute to enjoy the accomplishment and recharge so I can reconnect with and return some of the support for the people who have continued to show up for me throughout the last couple of years! So I guess the short answer is—a bit of rest, followed by a lot of collaboration!
Lastly, and most importantly, what kind of music do you like to listen to while working in the studio?
It really depends on my mood—but I’ve been stuck on one of my playlists for like 6 months. It’s mostly Daughter, Angel Olsen, Adrianne Lenker, Gigi Perez, Lucy Dacus – big sad lover girl energy. If you asked Spotify Daylist it would probably call my music taste something super rude like “Wistful Yearning Mallgoth Afternoon.”
😂
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