Lara
irene
 

I'm a queer artist based in Philadelphia. My body of work is in collage and textile arts, and focuses on piecing together images and text to convey complex feelings and experiences that often escape description. I explore themes of memory, nostalgia, and how vulnerability (or fear of vulnerability) informs our perspectives, using my own experiences. By piecing together different mediums, I believe that observers are encouraged to not just be static viewers, and to absorb the telling of these experiences. To not just hold the familiarity of shared experiences, but to participate in the telling and preservation of a story by lending a piece of themselves.

I create art in the spirit of abolition, believing that creative practices provide us with the imagination and different modes of thinking that are needed to radically re-imagine our society and relationships with one another. I live by the ideas of ACT UP: "Art without action is not enough." Art alone is not going to solve the vast inequities and violence in our systems, but it provides a different means of looking that is desperately needed, that opens us up to dreaming of a radically different future.

Currently, my work explores my journey as a queer person reclaiming myself from the male gaze.