STATEMENT  

In my recent sewn and woven works, I create rich encapsulating surfaces which speak to process, ritual, and menace. By accumulating and recombining images, I aim to create “wearable” phenomenological skins that explore the tensions between the introspective and the isolated, the subject and the Other. By referencing the human form and requiring viewer interaction, this recent work speaks to a theoretical fragmentation and isolation of the self while also allowing a complete object to form from the self and its donned skin. Through interacting with these works and seeing them either as the Other or as alternative skins for the self, viewers may somehow revive the lived experience through engagement of the all of the senses, whether the viewer is drawn out of herself by inhabiting an alternative skin or may feel encapsulated and enclosed in her own body. The many images combined in this work (menacing forms, biological referents, antiquated artifacts) interact to form a collective but constantly morphing meaning, asking the viewer to question how we receive these images and how our bodies relate to our conception of ourselves.

Emphasizing the imperfections possible in the techniques of dyeing, weaving, and sewing, I allow the works to take on an anthropological imagery, the sense that they are archaic relics on display, while also emphasizing the act of making as central to the logic of the work. The imagery suggests that these objects are at once living and inert by exercising a sort of attraction/repulsion on the viewer. Acting as phenomenological spaces, which may elicit anxiety, safety, or self-awareness, these works function as post-modern shells of a “schizophrenic” self. They should allow the viewer to reflect upon such multiple iterations of the self as well as the contemporary constructs of relationships, defined by states of isolation. My work lies somewhere between this space for unhindered interaction and a description of the rigid isolation and simultaneous scrutiny that characterizes “interaction” today. My aim is, if only for a moment, to return viewers to a state of introspection, labor, the visceral, the tactile, the organic, and awareness of our own bodies.

RESUME

2010 - present          San Francisco Art Institute, MFA Sculpture, San Francisco, CA
2010 - present          Director of the Swell Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2009 - 2010               MICA, Continuing Studies, Baltimore, MD
2008-2009                 École d’Art de Blois, Blois, France    
2008                          Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, B.A.,  Psychology
                                  Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society, Zeta Chapter of Ohio                
2006                          Artist’s Residency, Village des Arts, Dakar, Senegal