About

 About Peanut Butter People

I have always been interested in people; people as beings, as animals, as an impactful species. Humans are not inherently better or more advanced than Earth’s other creatures, we simply exist alongside them. I think people forget that they too are animals and end up putting themselves in their own category of a supreme species that has taken over the planet. However, we are still susceptible to disease, natural disasters, and attacks from other animals. Humans are not immune from the perils of survival other animals face just because we developed an economy. Although, one thing that does separate humanity from other species is our natural inclination to create art. I see art as a behavior found in the human species rather than a skill that can be capitalized. Back when humans were walking miles through intricate cave systems to find space to paint, there was no art professor or gallery owner behind that motivation. These humans simply wanted to paint a picture, so they did.  

In the modern era, the act of making art has ideas and conceptual reasoning backing the creation but that is because any art you see today is filtered through the lens of everything that artist has ever seen or experienced which includes the artworks and ideas of other artists and it is beautiful to try and track that. However, tracing back the original desire to create is impossible. Why would someone create art if no one else had done that before? I believe wanting to make art is like scratching an itch, you are not necessarily thinking through the explicit “why” of everything you are doing, but the brain experiences a desire that is only satisfied by the act of creation. It is something our body does automatically to make sense of the world. Being human and making art are so intrinsically linked that it is impossible to imagine a world where one exists without the other. 

As an autistic person, my own sense of humanity is something I think about often. Many autistic stereotypes include being described as “alien” or “robotic,” linking the non-human to the autistic brain. This dehumanization is truly a visceral experience, the grief that comes with the feeling of not belonging in a group you are supposed to fit into, and the guilt that grows from the solace of being “other.” If I am no longer human, I am no longer bound by the rules of human behavior and I can exist freely, but I continue to be bound by the judgement of humans based off of the expectations of what a human should be. I cannot exist outside of the human perspective as I am still a human regardless of the arbitrary social rules I do not follow. I exist in the dichotomy of being both human and non-human. My biology allows me to speak from a human perspective, and while I cannot escape my own humanity, I still have experience with being viewed as separate from other humans; I know what it is like for people to see me as something else. Conversely, I learned to start viewing the rest of humanity as separate from my own being. Typical human rituals became odd to me in the way that my own rituals are to others.   

In my work, I like to explore human experience. Turning the viewer into the archeologist perspective I see the world from; I project my own perspective onto my work and invite others to challenge themselves to question their experiences. Viewers should reflect on why they do certain things, why they have particular interests, and really think about what it means to view something completely outside of a human frame of reference. My practice, which I named “Peanut Butter People,” represents the plurality of my own experience being alive, both as human and as something else, while the name “Peanut Butter” comes from a childhood nickname my dad gave me as a reminder that there will never be a purely neutral, objective observation of the world as every being exists within the context of their own past experiences, inherently adding bias into how they interact with the world.