Big Women - twelve paintings Pirate Contemporary, Denver Colorado, 1997
Big Women (1997) is an earlier body of work where the figure operates as a direct site of cultural rhetoric. Monumental female forms—fragmented, exaggerated, and confrontational—are paired with stenciled text that names, disrupts, and reclaims the language historically imposed on women’s bodies.
Words such as hysteria, madness, and mirth are not illustrative but structural, functioning as both critique and material. They expose how meaning is constructed through repetition and history, while simultaneously destabilizing those constructions through scale, humor, and dissonance.
The work draws from feminist discourse, art history, and popular culture, collapsing distinctions between high and low imagery. References range from canonical sources to vernacular and cartoon forms, allowing multiple systems of representation to coexist and interfere with one another. The body becomes a field where these systems collide—biological, linguistic, and symbolic.
Installed alongside the large-scale paintings, a series of small male eye studies (unstretched canvas twelve inches square) that reverses the traditional gaze, isolating and fragmenting masculine presence. This juxtaposition shifts power dynamics, positioning the viewer within a reciprocal and unsettled field of looking.
While materially and visually distinct from later abstract work, Big Women establishes a foundational concern that continues throughout my practice: the investigation of how meaning is produced, transmitted, and experienced. In these works, the figure remains visible; in later work, it dissolves—but the underlying inquiry into energy, perception, and systems of meaning persists.
