Missy Pierce

Art making enables me to explore the human experience of hybrid identity and question our cultural preoccupation with identity and borders. In processing this subject matter, I am drawn to the style of absurdist humor adopted by the Dada artists of the early 20th century. I am particularly attracted to this style of art because it playfully provokes conversation rather than lectures or moralizes. Guided by this inspiration, my own creative objective is to capture, contrast and combine the different patterns, colors and rhythms that collide within us as we form our own identities. As part of my process, i juxtapose unrelated symbols from different cultures to blur the line between the familiar and the bizarre. In my mixed media practice, I displace elements from different places and cultures and coax them into a dialogue with one another. And while the resulting landscapes of displacement I create appear fantastical, they speak to my own experience growing up with an identity formed from two very different cultures.