A Burnt Orange 🧡🤎

Two Septembers ago, someone from South Carolina bought a print of my piece Connect ASL . It shows the ASL sign for “connect,” two hands linked together. I smiled when I saw the sale go through, mainly because September is Deaf Awareness Month. The timing itself was a little message back to me. I never set out to make art with sales in mind, and so far I don’t make much profit from these occasional sales, but it’s a joy when something I create resonates deeply enough for someone to bring it into their home. I know that feeling well. The pull toward an independent artist’s work, the desire to support them, and the spark of recognition in their vision. To be on the other side of that exchange is humbling, and in this case, it reminded me of an important part of my own story: my years (1998-2006) working as a notetaker for Deaf college students. My path into this work began almost by accident. In 1998, my mother passed away, and I drifted through community college feeling wayward and unfoc...

This collage is my response to The Midnight Sun , one of those haunting Twilight Zone episodes where the premise is simple: The Earth has shifted in orbit, the sun grows closer, and what unfolds is the earthlings’ desperation, feelings of isolation, and fear. Families try to escape to cooler regions. Looting ensues. Neighbors are being threatened at gunpoint. Fragile layers of human behavior begin to unravel. Part of what nudged me to work on this now were our recent heat waves here in the city- and I’m a big fan of the episodes that happen to take place in New York, as The Midnight Sun does. I began with soft fabrics to suggest Norma’s softness and vulnerability. Her silky slip, and her delicate, feminine demeanor.  Lois Nettleton as Norma But somewhere in the process, the fabrics became invasive to me, and parasitic. The false sun in the corner looms. Heavy, wrong, oppressive. Black lace flowers (taken from my old chokers) scatter like spores. The materials that were supposed t...