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artist statements
Like many, I live in a visual landscape pre-populated with sophisticated imagery: advertising images that, as packages, mediate between consumers and the products they buy. Wrapper-images like these are designed to give way, to open easily, to reveal: a meaning, a slogan, a product.
My art, too, is packaged beautifully, however it is stubborn about refusing to supply a product. Unwilling to give away easy answers, it responds with further complexity, to attempts to "open" it up to uncover simple meanings. Rather, I keep viewers on its enfolded surface, inviting explorations of the package itself.
Mimicking packaging's innocuous appeal, I offer up light-heartedness, humor, and sumptuous materials—warm wool, slick plastic, fragile paper, and food. Like my installations and performances, these materials are ephemeral. Their transience discloses that my work is only provisional, like a temporary soundstage set for a commercial or for a school play. Likewise, my performers, pairs of attractive young women, appear to offer a promise of availability, yet undermine that impression through their detached attitude and unrelenting, repeated actions. One might call this aspect of my work flirtation—seduction from a distance, innuendo without a climax—and it is no less serious for being so.
The body, especially the female body, is a notorious package produced by and for consumer culture. Its decorated surfaces form a container for filtering interactions with the contents housed inside. Yet I insist on maintaining the body's unyeilding surface because I refuse to equate psychological interiority with anatomical interiority, and by extension, I won't allow admittance to the so-called "depths" of complexity through the privilege of hermeneutical "penetration." In addressing the female body's resistive surface as a site for social interaction and personal actualization, my approach is then explicitly feminist.
Subsuming formal properties of my materials—their textures, colors, and decorated surfaces—I deploy an unabashed, seductive artifice. This heightened visual language emphasizes the role mundane materials play in mediating between people and their environment, between viewers and art, and in collective social relationships. To this end, I am producing a series of episodic experiments. In each I mount an encapsulated critique, packaging—as it were—a moment in my thinking.
