Jesus Saves! (I spend!)
2024
Colored Pencil, Marker, Cellophane, and Micron on Vellum
8.5″x11″

Author’s Note: There is a lot of question marks in this artist statement as they serve as both a self skepticism and a desperate Knock on Wood.

Here is a piece I started and worked on while at my new job. I feel uncomfortable divulging into my feelings about my previous employment, not in a way where I’m afraid to process my emotions, but more like I have a Nixon-era style of paranoia about the repercussions of publishing my insubordination on the internet.

After I finished Work Horse and obtained a job, I thought “now what?” I had just made a breakthrough in my practice and found some ground in making work about my struggles with labor, but now I like my job! What do I do? Woe is me, I like my job 😦 (This is absolutely sarcasm, I do love my job and I don’t want to seem ungrateful (there is that Nixon-era paranoia (maybe the next piece should be about that?))). So I wanted to think about what my place is as someone who is slowly climbing (?) some kind of ladder (??). If my work relies on a sense of precariousness, what do I create as my life becomes increasingly stable? (?)

I’ve also been trying to lean into working with opacity/ transparency more. Marz gave me a great critique saying I should keep exploring my work with vellum, so I decided to really lean into the transparency factor for this piece. It’s funny, I feel like transparency can represent clarity, but I almost see it as endless possibility for manipulation and change. Opacity feels more certain, opacity is a statement. Transparency is a question mark, translucency even more so. In fact, I feel like there’s cowardice in translucency. It wants to suggest something but not full commit. It’s a passive aggressive method of mark making. I see it as a fitting material to express the weird guilt I feel about finding presumed stability in my life.