In my art practice and my teaching, I work in print media and its related technologies. Print Media as a discipline includes both the material practice of making repeatable images and texts, as well as the discursive space in which ideas about how, when multiplied, reproduced, and disseminated, images and texts contribute to the formation of identity and community through shared knowledge. I define printmaking in the most expansive way, including a range of processes from potato prints to interactive digital outputs. In taking the notion of the computer – more specifically, digital code as manifested in pixels and vectors – as the matrix, a variety of output methods that seem disparate can be thought of as an extension of the language of print, due to their inherent reproducibility. A digital “print” can exist in still, moving, and interactive forms.

My interest in print media is in its social function as a means of reproducing visual and textual information, especially in the ways in which codes of behavior, power structures, and belief systems are manifested in mass-produced works. Print media, through enabling reproduction and dissemination, can be used as a tool of power by entrenching ideologies in a society, while also providing for the possibility of their dismantling. I examine to popular mass media – women’s magazines, advertisements, mass-produced toys, news programs, and children’s books, for example – and the ways that the images and texts generated by these media, through their perpetual repetition, can form an accepted “truth.”

As such, popular media can be seen as a primary vehicle for normalizing ideologies of power. In response, my current work unpacks the ways that militarism and militaristic activities are illustrated, appropriated and reproduced in material culture aimed at children. I am particularly interested in the ways that symbols of power are made to seem harmless through their use in entertainment and decoration. Their manifestation in children’s toys and printed matter, for instance, relegate them into the realm of play. Mimicking adult objects and situations, toys miniaturize, sanitize, and simplify; coated in sugar-sweet colors, they exist within a veneer of harmlessness, using the guise of play to lull and seduce viewers into participation. I appropriate the visual and verbal language used in these media – overly lush and colorful, almost-cute, and seemingly simplistic scenarios – as a means of commenting on and questioning the many ways that our contemporary society is militarized. Through this process, I aim to uncover hidden readings and provide alternatives to dominant cultural narratives.