Artist Statement

Joker Stardust began as an inquiry into consumerism guided by my fascination with vintage aesthetics including pop art, mid-century design, retrofuturism, and vaporwave. I sourced my images and materials from my grandmother’s house and from a box of print ephemera I purchased at my local thrift store for two dollars. By using only found materials to create original artwork, I aimed to explore the potential latent in discarded, secondhand items. As my collages developed, I noticed unexpected threads of religion and creation myths emerge in my work through imagery such as angels, nuns, and babies. I started to consider how these motifs interacted with the initial narrative of consumerism, and found myself contemplating how human creativity functions as a small-scale parallel to humanity’s notions of divine creation. Employing the liminal assemblage of collage, I thus interrogate whether it is in humanity’s best interest to believe that there is a divine presence, which could provide incentive to create and consume with intention, rather than with the recklessness seen in the present consumerist model. I find this discourse to be especially prudent as society grapples with the implications of religion, hyperconsumerism, and generative artificial intelligence, all of which hold the potential to permanently alter humanity’s current conceptions of creativity.