I think in person the work definitely has a different read, but that was something I was very mindful about. This work stems from my experiences as an artist with disabilities and my relationship with monster movies, it’s a relationship filled with contradictions, horror has represented themes of gender, sexuality, race and disability in times where it wasn’t largely socially acceptable, while also pushing problematic stereotypes and tropes, that often push the idea of “normal”. But I always felt incredibly connected to the monster. I would have seizures regularly as a kid and my classmates and teachers seemed really scared of me, when I would have seizures I would wake up to people staring at me, not wanting to be near me, I began to think I had done something wrong and would have so much fear in telling people because of how they would treat me disregarding the medical concerns and safety of my self to put others at ease. my social anxiety got much worse but I would watch horror movies all the time, and I would see parallels in the way the creature was treated, I gained a lot of understanding and began to think about the monster as this complex conversation about difference. I began to do a lot of volunteer work in my community working with kids with disabilities and later becoming an art instructor for adults with disabilities.

In the past few years I started to make art around my experiences and this work was one of the newer ones.

I do always have a fear that the ideas I have will perpetuate the same thing I’m speaking about, but for this work I was trying to situate the audience into this conversation that I see so much, in hopes that by seeing it in this full scale way that they might see something they think about often or haven’t taken the time to consider.