Future Nostalgia

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My earliest conceptual memory involves cutting up my mother’s blinds and coloring on them (followed by a stern “You can’t just cut them up” and a trip to Wal-Mart for new ones). I was the kid drawing on the walls and crawling out of the crib to draw in a book. I only took it seriously when I attended North Hennepin Community College, and have been fortunate to be able to balance my painting with my developing career in the trades.

 

People might judge me based on my social media presence as only painting memes—because it’s my most commercially successful work—but I’m an artist with a firm foot in capturing social history from a perspective under-represented in the art world. My childhood wasn’t glamorous, I come from a family affected by poverty, substance abuse, and jailtime. I grew up between my mom’s house in Anoka and my Grandparents’ in the trailer park. I spent a lot of time in the car and by the record player with my Grandma. I knew we were poor, I knew why my dad was gone for years. You can’t hide these things from children.

 

Frankly, I’m driven by wanting to heal my inner child. This is a series I’ve stalled on for 2 ½ years because of how long it’s taken me to work through my trauma, let alone feeling confident to seek funding to execute it. I want to give the audience a different way of seeing poverty: If they see it from a child’s memory, I hope it will make them think more deeply about what it means to be working-class poor.​