The Healing Deity Series - Three years ago I began painting a series of digital images that I called my healing deities. The first of these images, Healing Buddha, was made towards the end of my recovery from a chronic environmental illness. This series was prompted by a question asked by my then 4-year old son, "Mommy, are you painting another picture of a sick person?" Up until that time, my son, who had recently become conscious of what my images represented, had only seen me paint pictures of illness. Since the early nineties I had been focused on an activist art project called "CANARY NOTES: The Personal Politics of Environmental Illness." Many of the portraits I had painted for that project were of sick people, victims of environmental toxins. My son's question was a reminder that I needed to extend my focus beyond "the wound," and experience imagery that expressed the healing of that wound. I immediately started my series with Buddha and boddhisatvas, pagan gods, goddesses, and yoga poses dancing out of my stylus. During the past few months I have felt an urgency to combine these images of breathing deities with landscapes like that of Yucca Mountain, the West Bank, modern urban settings experiencing disaster, and the border of Pakistan/India.

Other: Breaking Out of the Box features a series of recent digital prints that investigate cultural identity, the pressure to conform and the challenge to celebrate diversity in contemporary consumer culture. Various narrative texts that are related to the theme are inserted within scanned advertisements from the fifties and sixties. The stories reveal many aspects of living in a diverse society where difference is either commodified or feared. Many of the pieces combine humor and irony with stories of fear, shame and the courage to transform both. In part of the gallery, a large story box was placed with 28 slots for different categories of "otherness." Members of the audience were invited to share their own stories about prejudice and assimilation and share them with others who visit the space. The box was covered with tissue paper membranes (like a thin skin) that the viewer needed to punch open in order to leave their story. Augusta Savage Gallery, New Africa House, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (2001).