Care Bears, melting ice cream, and falling stars operate as leftover remnants of a childhood that ended as though it never quite existed. Through my artwork, I express a generational longing for a childhood that seems to have left us unprepared for later life. The characters in my prints are stuck in an obscure territory between adolescence and adulthood. They have lost their youthful innocence but have not yet gained adult maturity. Unable to reenter the world of childhood, they play at being adults by attempting to understand sexuality, adult relationships, and grimmer themes of life and death.
I attempt to understand and investigate the childhood experience through using the same vocabulary of my youth. I appropriate images of Care Bears, Disney ice cream popsicles, and coloring book drawings of girls and boys. Through my work, I search for the absent entity that will give me some understanding of my life. I pull at different images from the ephemera of my childhood, searching aimlessly through the refuse of my youth for something lost that I will never find. I can only look back on it with nostalgic longing and regret.