Re:PRODUCTION
INSTALLATION + SPECULATIVE
Part of the Re:Production Series, the following works were designed installations and speculative designs (Imagined scenarios based on sculpted objects). Each uses the visual and material vernacular of systems of mass-production (neon, packaging, plastic, etc.) to question these networks, part of a larger practice that looks at labor networks in the human, animal, and industrial realms.
Digital Romance
Digital Romance were made by casting the interiors of clam packaging that comes with cosmetic items, girls' toys, and maternity objects (baby bottles, baby nipples). The castings reveal a latent sensuality in gendered products, a kind of visual vernacular of industrial production.
untitled: cookie cutter installation
Untitled: Cookie Cutters is an installation that uses ~400 vintage metal and plastic cookie cutters. The installation is 20 by 15 feet long and is inspired by natural growths: condensation, lichen, moss, but manifested in plastic and aluminum.
neon shopping cart
A grant-funded full scape shopping cart in glass, Neon Shopping Cart elevates the cart - a quasi-religious symbol in free-market society - to the level of a neon deity. The project also points to its flattening to simulacra as digital experience (in this case online shopping) encroaches on real-world experience.
pill (sign)
Sign is a sign I designed after a nine month apprenticeship as a neon bender after the economic recession in 2008. Sign is 6 feet long (the approximate length of a shop sign). I envision it in deserted storefronts, an anonymous and abstract artistic medicine (pill) for economic abandonment. The pill for me is a powerful metaphor for function and dys/function, aligning the body with a machine that works or does not. Culturally, the pill is regarded as a panacea, though it may merely be a palliative.
This was part of a storefront exhibition, Sugar in the Raw (Richmond, VA, 2009), in an abandoned downtown storefront - a show sanctioned by the real estate owner and worked out through an intermediary arts institute. Much of the property in downtown Richmond - at that time - had been purchased and left to decay, leading to the destruction/preservation of many vintage signs from the 1920's onward.
mother
Mother is a performance with cows. Interested in the idea of the cow as a biological machine from which we are all weaned (as articulated by Janine Antoni), I fashioned mylar balloons in the shape of different Disney characters and princesses, sanitized commercial sex symbols. I envisioned these hovering above the field while the cows milled around them, and capturing the piece with video, but wind conspired against me, and the cows, instead of being placid or unaware, reacted with fear and real curiosity, herding their young away from the balloons after investigating them. The same weekend I captured this, a mother and her calf (who are sold quickly after being born) had disappeared. They were later found in a shed where she was hiding with her young, anticipating the separation.
Parts
In Parts, the precariously balanced fenders positioned like hips and covered in a flesh-tone automotive paint explore conventions in which cars and bodies are similarly branded as objects to own and modify for sex appeal, revealing bodies as sites for a precarious balance of function and emotion. In the Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan wrote “To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit …. As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car.
ambiguous genitalia (toy)
Throughout my practice I have been interested in Investigating the systems of products we are surrounded by and how I can create work that alters or disrupts the typical narrative.
I ran a small tutoring business to put myself through school and purchased ‘treats’ for my students who were little; small toys and candy. Inevitably the toys they requested broke down on gender lines and I was (and still am) amazed at how aisles of commercial toys encourage distinct gender identities from a very early age- a kind of conditioning, and a limited binary vocabulary.
I created this toy to reference a spectrum of identities from male to female. Part art-object and part toy, it is neither useful nor geared towards children, simply a visual manifestation of a spectrum of bodily development we rarely hear about, but that exists for many people.
Credit: Ilya Grey, package design
bloop
Bloop is an installation I created as a student at VCU after learning how to craft foam and fiberglass forms. These are ambiguous biomorphic forms that also reference different technologies. I envisioned them as a 3D comic, mindlessly ‘watching’ an empty word. The word BLOOP stretches 26 feet long and is 12 feet high.
sprinkle chair
Sprinkle Chair was the first sculpture that I created when I quit my salaried position to pursue a career as an artist and academic. This sculpture plays with the tension between desire and monotony, and was inspired by 'Office Parties', where cake and ice cream are presented among (sometimes) alienated workers as a means of creating an environment of intimacy in a capitalist-driven void. The chair is covered in sprinkles, and the shadow is chocolate syrup. The piece is deliberately not coated in resin and therefore requires a great deal of maintenance to ensure that essential workers (ants, insects + mice) do not 'destroy' the illusion.
lowe’s cart
As I was beginning to learn about different materials (in this case, metal), I became interested in ideas of function and production and how they are at odds with ideas of being, or the unpredictability of existence. I find dollies very beautiful and had just learned to work with metal so I ‘borrowed’ one from Lowe’s and altered it, adding and painting extra bars, making it more sculptural and less functional. I then reinserted it into the material vocabulary of function and performance of industriousness to see observe how it might provide a moment that altered the usual narrative, creating a small space for wonder, just existing.