As an artist, I am concerned with concepts of fiction, particularly as they relate to gender issues, narrative voice and power relations.  My artwork weaves together strands of narrative to form a unified text.  Fairy tales, Fifties film icons, professional wrestling, and other pop-culturally significant imagery are at play in these works, their relationships constructing a domain in which the porosity of the boundary between fiction and reality is revealed and explored. 

Nadia is the late 1970s punk-rock manifestation of the femme fatale; she embodies the spirit of fierce female icons such as Lilith and Cleopatra.  Questions of the character’s authenticity, along with her apparently predatory relations with men, are at the core of the story told, incompletely, in these artworks. The elements of sex, love, violence and death situate this narrative in the tradition of the classic (super)-hero’s misadventure.  Images of 1950s pin-ups, car magazines, concert t-shirt graphics, and 1980s female performance artists comprise the visual texture of the works.  Brazen use of colour, and the sheer scale of the drawings, reflect the audacity of the character and the era in which Nadia Nefariously’s story is set.

All of my drawings represent women and men in relation with each other in the context of dramatic and sometimes confounding settings.
 
The viewer, upon encountering each work, is compelled to reconstruct a suggested story, and when encountering the works as a series, is transported into a quasi-mythology.  Here, s/he is introduced to a host of characters and locations inhabiting an alternate universe.  In this mythological world, the polarities of male and female, truth and fiction, are conflated: Historical music figures converse with fictional characters in unusual but familiar settings; female protagonists take on masculine roles; and creatures from children’s nightmares present themselves in beamingly amiable form.  In the ambiguity of the relations among their figures, the works raise questions about the locus of narrative and sexual power.  Whatever the answers, the viewer is only allowed to know part of the story, and is compelled to determine the rest. The work shown in the accompanying images captures scattered pieces of the meteoric rise-and-fall “Legend of Nadia Nefariously.”