Artist Statement My figurative paintings and drawings explore advancing technology, my identity and experience as a female, and my interest in the male gaze. Thinking about my increased online activity, virtual places, and future concepts like the meta-verse I notice our online presence is valued over our physical lives. Furthermore, as we become increasingly entwined in the digital world, I am creating work that prompts the viewer to have a mediated digital experience with my material object. By combining augmented reality work with painting, the digital agitates the physical and spiritual experience the viewer has. AI and augmented reality are new tools that face more questions than answers, and I embrace these tools by producing work that references a digital realm. Utilizing programs such as stable diffusion and augmented reality, I explore the back-and-forth process between the tactile and materiality of oil painting, with the digital and intangible. Tactility and object-making are imperative in my process concerning digital and AI-generated works that are becoming more prominent and created on sites like DALLE2 and Midjourney. The digital and AI heightens the importance of the painting process as materiality becomes more precious. My process involves controlling a fluid medium such as oil paint like a machine and then releasing the control to the tool in the digital process to explore the relationship between fluidity and fixity. I deliberately use technologically advanced programs such as AI, Photoshop, digital editing software, and augmented reality in my process of creating. In my palette, I use saturated pigments and fluorescent paint bringing figuration out of abstraction and combining local color with full-chroma pigments to replicate a digital space in the real world. My process involves inserting preliminary sketches and figure drawings into a trained program to prompt imagery based on my scanned drawing or painting. After the physical process of oil painting, I document and convert the physical painting into a digital image I feed it into an AI program called deform stable diffusion using Google collab to create frames for animation. Using this animation in AR I create the opportunity for my cross-sectional work to become interactive and utilize physical and digital space simultaneously. As a girl and young adult my job as a commercial model revolved around the male gaze. Putting myself on like a costume and performing to please the viewer. My experiences as a woman using conventional beauty pressured to fill a role created my interest in ownership and agency as we contain the power of looking along with being looked at. My work is influenced by my understanding of the male gaze, coined by Laura Mulvey in the Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The digital gaze is our best image presented for open consumption, leaving people who use social media feeling the desire to perform for each other. In my work, I am interested in my experience as a female, as it pertains to the woman figure and the male gaze. I subversively paint women to challenge the male gaze and the transactional patterns of the viewer and viewed on social media.