In The Shape of Space, Jellybean Bonanza’s world stretches, ruptures, and reshapes itself—asking what it means to change so deeply that you no longer fit where you once belonged. This immersive installation unfolds like a soft rupture: a layered visual field of biomorphic symbols, bleeding shapes, and explosive color. Drawing on abstraction, pop aesthetics, and emotional intuition, the work invites viewers into a landscape where language is in flux and transformation is both personal and mythic.
The accompanying artist statement—fragmented across twenty physical puzzle pieces—was assembled and read aloud by the audience in random order. This performative gesture literalizes the feeling of trying to piece together a self in motion. Inspired by Cage and Cunningham’s strategies of chance, the act of communal reading becomes its own choreography of meaning, mirroring the way memories, identities, and emotions reassemble over time.
With graphic clarity and emotional ambiguity, the work constructs a new design system—one that reflects felt truths over fixed categories. Here, symbolism is provisional, identity is shapeshifting, and space itself is something you can walk into, get lost in, and return from—changed.
or - Twelve Things I Saw on the Quest That You Would Not Believe, and I Cannot Describe
In this body of work, twelve large-scale silkscreens act as elusive artifacts from a journey beyond understanding. Biomorphic, ambiguous, and alive with color, each piece resists simple interpretation—offering instead a constellation of symbols that evoke transformation, perception, and the unknown.
Rooted in intuitive mark-making and print-based experimentation, these forms resemble strange characters, primordial beings, or otherworldly organisms. They hover between specificity and abstraction, inviting viewers to invent their own meaning while acknowledging a deeper, implied logic—like reading tarot without a guidebook.
A companion poem and cootie catcher extend the playfulness and mystery of the series, echoing themes of love, strangeness, and the infinite spiral of becoming. Together, these elements suggest that the quest for self is not linear, but cyclical—ever returning, always changing, and full of visions that defy easy description.
Where must we travel to find our truest self—and what strange, beautiful, or treacherous places do we encounter along the way?
Deep Feelings continues Jellybean Bonanza’s quest as she navigates surreal landscapes of identity, transformation, and return. Using photographic collage, stop-motion animation, and sound, this work blends waking life with dreamscape, portraying key transitions in her evolution.
Each scene reflects a distinct emotional and spiritual phase: the naïve comfort of home, the seductive pull of the desert unknown, the disorienting shimmer of societal illusions, and the vast stillness of cosmic enlightenment. A layered soundtrack—featuring Nina Simone, Space Lady, The Velvet Underground, and Sun Ra—compresses time, weaving together cultural memory, personal nostalgia, and feminist critique.
Ready-made materials evoke femme childhood: cotton puffs, sequins, and mirror surfaces flicker between innocence and overwhelm, softness and distortion. As Jellybean spirals through each phase, the work mirrors the normative arc of womanhood—childhood, puberty, sexual awakening, and old age—while challenging those linear expectations.
Ultimately, Deep Feelings asks what it means to return. Can transformation be carried back from the stars, reshaping not only the self, but the everyday world she left behind?
This body of work marks the beginning of my ongoing exploration into personal empowerment and liberated identity. Through the lens of Cosmic Cowgirl, I reimagine my own coming-of-age story—an attempt to reclaim what was lost to early sexualization, objectification, and the pressures of gender conformity.
At the center is Jellybean Bonanza, a nine-year-old alter ego who receives a prophetic warning in a dream. With the help of divine guides and a mood ring attuned to danger, she embarks on a journey to protect her spirit from the forces that seek to diminish her.
Drawing from memories, toys, and pop culture of my 1990s girlhood, the work mixes softness with intensity: pastel hues speak to innocence, while neon and reflective surfaces signal distortion, danger, and societal complicity. The cowgirl—a figure both wild and oversexualized—becomes a tool of resistance. Jellybean doesn’t escape objectification, but she learns to navigate and subvert it.
Spanning imagined landscapes of the American West, deep sea, and outer space, this story is about more than escape—it's about transmutation. Can Jellybean bring back the cosmic wisdom she discovers and use it to transform her world from within?
