artist statement
My art practice investigates the American cultural landscape, contemporary aspirational lifestyles, and the idiosyncratic intersection of tourism and elitism. Shopping malls, airports, lifestyle centers, megachurches, and suburban subdivisions are often active participants and central characters in my work. I reveal the economic, political, and social implications of systemic privilege through uncanny performance videos and lens-based documentation. I ask the viewer to re-evaluate their relationship with what is familiar to them, and consider why, when, where, and what they consume.
My current body of work explores and examines the plight of the culturally fractured inhabitants of the American landscape. This work involves the NÆ persona. NÆ’s musical allegories illustrate the cyclical dichotomies that white privilege contains. Through the use of multiple caricatures of white women, I investigate systemic entitlement, boredom, addiction, and over-consumption as a result of privilege. The various caricatures are flippant; dominated by a thirst for social status and personify the hapless results of aspirational lifestyle marketing.
“I shop, therefore I am.”
Barbara Krueger, 1987
“I’m all lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily, I came here for that special offer, a guaranteed personality”
The Clash, 1979
“For the white female Instagrammer, there is nothing she can do to decrease her social value. Her inalienable objectification is due to the fact that her status in our world is predetermined.”
Kionius, 2020
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Black Lives Matter Movement, 2020
“This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
“Buying is more American than thinking and I’m as American as they come.”
Andy Warhol, 1975
JaNae Contag 