Allowing myself to make artwork about fashion was an indulgent and necessary development. My drawings needed to be bigger because they were moving physically forward. After coyly naming the series "Fashism", I was wisely reprimanded by the critic Zane Fisher for the weak combination of "fashion" and "facism" for a title. The more appropriate and honest title of the new work came me to me a month after the show opened.

When I get to Miami or New York and pull out the card that gets me past the beautiful crowd, into the front row seat of a fashion show, my heart always skips. I still feel like it isn’t quite my place, that I don’t quite belong, that somehow, even with the store and the focus of my art, I have managed to slip in uninvited. So I rechristen my work with all the love, emotion, and labor that has gone into understanding it. I am the first to sit in front of my art, decide on this season’s trends and colors, models and themes. I am V.I.P. These girls in my new work are "V.I.P.": first off the line to be ushered into the club. They are bizarre and overtly sexual to the point of primal indecency. They follow trends to the edge of racism and criminal intent. They will wear anything to be beautiful and young, noted and admired. There is no limit to their acceptance of ornamentation as a vehicle for displaying luxury and defining fashion.

Being raised in a feminist environment can trip a budding fashionista on her heels. Coveting luxury goods from an objectifying industry did not coincide with the "Our Bodies Ourselves" mantras and aesthetics of my childhood. Sure, I believe in gender equality and I continue to fight and raise money to ensure women’s rights locally and globally. I also believe there are women who are more beautiful that other women. I am talking about the outside, the surface and facade.

I enjoy the glistening shell the fashion industry delivers to me. Perhaps the environment I was raised in allows me step back in a way less politically nourished women are able to. No amount of dieting, makeup, surgery, or jewelry will transform me into the six foot tall Japanese Brazilian girl slamming her lean frame down the bright runway. Her skin is amazing, her body defined and unconventional. While I desire to slip inside her and view the world from behind her smoky eyes, I understand that this is the wonder of fashion and the fashion industry. She is a luminous screen draped in silk and I project a reality onto her. The narration behind my projection determines my version of the show’s success. I am obligated to my aesthetic.

I relate birds to renters. Birds are poverty jetsetters. They find a spot, build a nest out of existing material, and hope other birds, the environment, or city planners don’t come around and claim it. I have collected fallen nests for years. My friends and family bring them to me. I am most in love with the ones that are clearly a product of their location- I have one from a costruction site that is primarily fiberglass, one made out of mechanically shredded paper fallen from a downtown corner, another packed with ratty tape from an audio cassette. These nests were my base and inspiration. My recent drawings are not the product of ornithology, but rather urban policy.

"Pretty Babies" introduces complex bodies to a discriminative audience. Avoiding the obvious flip of replacing contemporary fashion bodies with morbidly obese models, these drawings glamorize distorted standards. The defence of natural emaciation is secured with even more obscure body types and examples. Effects of medical malpractice, chromosomes gone array, and intense deterioration are glorified with designer names and haute couture. "Pretty Babies" refreshes positions on beauty and records an industry based on fluctuating luxury. My drawings of deformation become exotic and coveted attributes.

I came upon twin fawns in the display case of a mom and pop toy and science store in Kansas City, MO. It took me two years of consistently visiting to win the trust of the shop owner and save the money to buy them. The story goes that a taxidermist spotted a dead deer by the side of the road. He went to properly dispose of the body and realized she was pregnant. When he opened her and found nearly full term twin fawns, he removed them and carefully preserved them.

Deer rarely have twins and the taxidermist retained the uterine gesture of their bodies. I built them a Plexiglas cube with a light blue base. Their prematurity exaggerates the natural delicacies of what would already be an incredibly sweet thing to behold. The points of their hooves, the length of their lashes, the spots of their hides curl nose to small nose projecting cartoonish realism.Reactions to the tiny creatures are multifaceted and diverse. Because they are so well preserved and unencumbered by the usual fake landscape and flowers, there is an audience who expects them to wake up. Children tap the display and embarrass their parents. Young women ask me who killed them. People let their eyes trick them into believing the fawns are breathing. The tragedy of beauty is its flight.

The twins are gilded by their own demise so they are sleeping beauties.The twin fawns have been muses since I first saw them. The Mint Forest Series began with identical lithographed backgrounds, a soft Bambi green print copied from a Japanese children’s book. The figures that emerged were, like the fawns, delicate, and tragic. Jon Bonet Ramsey preened her way into the series. The case of Precious Doe, an ongoing investigation of a beheaded young African - American girl, perched herself between trees, her throat draped in poinsettias.The Mint Forest took on a storyboard when I placed the pieces side by side. The characters seemed posed in space and the narration changed based on the hanging pattern. The lithograph became a backdrop for fairytale glamour shots. Scenarios I imagined from newspaper articles were easier to explore cocooned in pastel green.

We drench death in lilies and bronze the names of our dead sons on walls. We erect altars of toys and hold candlelight vigils to display our hope. My twin fawns sleep endlessly on their baby blue block in my studio. These two creatures never opened their eyes yet their wondrous fatality evokes an acceptable alternative reality.

For six years I lived on the corner of a prostitution traffic point. I watched drug addicted women cross the state line to avoid being arrested, fumble in and out of cars as I came and left my home. I was hosting dance in the space and I asked the ballerinas to bring me their old point shoes. To lighten the visual load of the sex workers and play off the familiar drug-house marker of sneakers on telephone lines, I knotted the shoes together and swung them up and over the lines in the same way. The weather tattered the silk and exposed the inner workings of the shoes. I dated them as they fell and swung them back up if they weren’t destroyed to my pleasing. When I moved, I rented a cherry picker and took them down. I keep them in a basket in my studio.

This seven print set is a four year project based on reinvented children’s stories. Seven to ten plates of color, a woodcut forest, and carefully placed cut silk present a captivating delicacy that is inviting and disturbing. Each situation is a fragile tragedy placed gently in a forced set. The "Forest" shifts through seasons or light to reveal the possible lives of familiar situations. Red Riding Hood is shrouded in Turkish brocade, burdened by the gestation of her loveless matrimony. Snow White is an addict and Hansel and Gretel lean forward, Arbus angels, barely obscuring their disarming bond. Fairytales are posed to prepare tender ears for uncomfortable situations and resolve them to champion fear. "Father Gander" represents edited moments of adult projection and human conflict.