Unknown Artist is an ongoing multifaceted series of works in video art, photography, installation, and social media examining depictions of fictional visual artist characters in film and television. Driven by a desire to assemble an exhaustive archive, I began collecting depictions of these characters from films and television shows in 2019. Now numbering over 2,800 clips spanning from 1914 to 2025, my archive is an ever expanding encyclopedia of stereotypes and caricatures of artists as they are portrayed in mainstream media. This archive is the source material for my ongoing series, Unknown Artist.

Collectively, these representations reveal how artists are characterized and mythologized, how they inform a cultural and overly romanticized understanding of who the artist is, and how they mirror a dominant fantasy of the artist as white, male, obsessed, and suffering. Each work takes a unique formal approach to the material and functions as its own thematic volume within the larger series titled Unknown Artist. The works investigate how the artist’s identity has been shaped by popular media, at times humorously while probing questions about gender stereotypes, visual clichés, and the assumptions Hollywood cinema makes to communicate “artist” on screen. Together, the series is an exploration of artistic identity and the stories we inherit.

Each of my video works begins with a rough outline of a narrative arc or conceptual rule, sometimes both. The storylines and rules determine where I look in my moving image archive for material that informs the work. Alternatively, ideas emerge through formal or thematic patterns I notice during my research. From there, I begin building scripts that inform the construction of the work. In addition to research and archiving, my work relies on rotoscoping, collage, animation, and montage for its form and meaning.

My own understanding of what it means to be an artist has inevitably been informed by the cultural images that surround me. How have these images shaped the ways we picture artists, ourselves, and the possibilities available to us? And how has my experience of being a female artist been impacted by others’ internalized stories from the media they’ve consumed? Through Unknown Artist, I use the fictional artist as a lens through which to examine these questions, considering how repeated cultural images become assumptions, expectations, and myths about who an artist is and what an artist should be.