NIMBY (the forest) Drawing

My delicately rendered drawings manipulate perception, creating fantastical iterations in which artificial and natural imagery fuse to become newly impossible scenes. Processing seemingly disparate parts into a surreal whole, I derive inspiration from the urban environment, environmental issues, political topics, and graphic design and font elements. Working in graphite pencil on paper, I create obsessively detailed works with cross hatching techniques, mining a trove of symbols and objects from my collection of images and integrating them into an amalgamated version of reality. My recent body of work, titled “Not In My Back Yard,” references the “NIMBY” acronym that was coined within the environmental and conservation movement. These drawings explore the ugly elements of the urban environment, placing objects like food trucks, oil derricks, caged trees, graffiti, windmills, and out of place animals into imagined settings that seem plausible yet are dystopic. I use the juxtaposition between natural and man-made surroundings to illustrate the invasive tendencies of modern urbanization. Without blatantly depicting nature as being “under-siege” by modernity, the drawings instead capture the imbalance created when nature tries to reclaim or adapt to urban expansion. My work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Cristinerose Gallery and Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York City, Haphazard Gallery and the Creative Artists’ Agency in Los Angeles, CA, romo gallery in Atlanta, GA, Bandini Art in Culver City, CA, California State University Dominguez Hills in Carson, CA, Moorpark College in Moorpark, CA, and Phantom Galleries in Long Beach, CA. My drawings represented the Southern California region in a 2015 biennial at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. My work has also been included in exhibits in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston; and Berlin, Mexico, Colombia, and Canada; and in other museum exhibits in San Francisco, CA, Long Beach, CA, Laguna Beach, CA, and Indianapolis, IN. I am the recipient of individual artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2012), The City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowship (2014), The Center for Cultural Innovation’s Artist’s Resources for Completion grant (2012), a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s (NY, NY) L.A.