My work is the foundation I build between cultural spaces. I am not white, but I am too white to be black. I was born an American citizen in Okinawa, an island that struggles to reclaim its own identity as a nation separate from Japan and America. And though I grew up celebrating Jewish holidays and surrounded by the art of the Athabaskan speaking tribes of Alaska, I have no heritage in these cultures that influenced my early aesthetics, and beliefs. While culture is a way to ground oneself in a community, this cultural ambiguity is a prolonged state of lingering until someone asks you to leave. Rather than continuing to shift between cultural spaces, I have chosen to build a home no one can kick me out of.

Fabric, paper, light, shadow, my voice, and ambient noise are the building materials I use to craft the myth of my identity. Essential to every culture’s self-expression and communication, fabric and paper form the physical artifacts of my story. Light and shadow bridge the gap between tangible reality and immaterial experience and perception. And my voice mixed with ambient noise places my thumbprint on a specific location and point in time. Together these elements pull the ambiguous spaces into focus, expanding the accepted history of human experience and claiming space for myself and other culturally ambiguous people.