Cypress

Studio Artist

Religious Trauma, Native Identity, and Adoption Exploration in a Fine Art Practice

Exploring the Intersection of Race, Adoption and Evangelical Culture Through a Studio Practice

"The church has created a culture where wanting equal rights, when those rights inherently go against the church, is wrong. The government must function for the evangelical church or it is quite literally the end of the world. This is not a view that has changed with the laws either. While I understand that gender and sexuality are two very different things, for the sake of understanding this culture we are going to conflate them for a brief moment. Derrick Dillard, the husband to Jill Duggar, went on Twitter in 2017 to make some statements about the star of another long-running TLC show, Jazz Jennings. Dillard tweeted (with censoring for my own sanity): “I pity Jazz, 4 those who take advantage of h** in order 2 promote their own agenda, including the parents who allow these decisions 2 be made by a child. It’s sad that ppl would use a juvenile this way. Again, nothing against h** just unfortunate what’s on tv these days.” Dillard crafts a very careful argument here, it’s not the child’s identity that matters, because their identity does not exist. It is that the parents support the child, that they allow the child to participate in medical decisions. In Dillard’s eyes, allowing a child to be transgender is condemning them and their parents to hell for all eternity. It is a sad affair, not a joyous celebration. It is something that should be hidden away and ignored, not to be televised. This comes from a residual fear that seeing queer people will encourage children to be queer."

"While the Disney Company was playing up every stereotype of Native Identity in the 1950s to children, that influence resonated outside of that era and technically still continues to, while the company lists a statement before the online streaming that some of the depictions might be offensive, the film has not been removed from streaming services. Sixty-four years later, the influence of this film was still so strong that a young Native man wrote his version of it. A version that calls out the stereotypes of the original points out that the view of westernization being universal is wrong. Alongside the history of White America, is the history of Native America."

"I subsequently picked up that glove, and then I continued to pick up gloves. I am now surrounded by gloves, when I think I’m done with gloves, they return. Sighn described the archives as “an elusive hope of our individual salvation.” The act of picking up gloves felt as if it was going to save me, it was my tether to the earth, my tether to other people. It was my way of processing and understanding and remembering. It made me believe that I was important. Harvesting the power of the archive taught me that I could use the weapons of colonialization as tools, I could turn them against their system, using them to my advantage."

America, Eat Your Heart Out (2023)

White Chocolate, Intergenerational Trauma

In countries that value chocolate enough to have standards, white chocolate is not a chocolate. It does not have the components that make up a chocolate. There is no chocolate liquor, the main characteristic of chocolate. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, was never a member of the KKK, but he did carve Stone Mountain for a set period of time, the techniques he learned in carving Stone Mountain were then used to create Mount Rushmore. On treaty land that was stolen in war, the United States Government commissioned a white supremist to carve four presidents faces into a mountain that was sacred. The artist can not uncarve the mountain, no one can but the earth itself with time and plenty of rain. Instead, the artist will consume chocolate in large quantities in the shape of Mount Rushmore. The artist invites you to be culpable in the demise of this mountain.