We live in a strange world, where we touch screens more than the ones we love. By day, I work as an image correction specialist in the beauty industry, spending several hours in a dark room, carefully removing facial imperfections. This work profoundly informs my art practice as I stockpile hundreds of digital blemishes and color adjustments to construct new portraits. I integrate these elements into my work to open up discussions of image manipulation, computerized labor, and self-perception.

The animation "Not Very Pretty (Close Up)" is based on my physical work on canvas titled "Not Very Pretty". In my series “Color, Balance,” bodily artifacts removed from fashion photography become the base for paintings I create in Photoshop. I add subtle layers of digital paint and push pixels to blend the figure’s remnants into the background. I use color as a spatial feature, shifting away the boundary of the body to further blur lines between abstraction and figuration. Works are given life and animated in After Effects.