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2017 Sheet and furniture installation with video
Domestic Structures at Athica, Athens, GA
In a sociopolitical climate of ever-increasing fear mongering, we are guided towards seeking protection, encouraging territorial isolation and building walls. Often times, these measures manifest in futile attempts at safeguarding against invisible threats. The indoor household fort represents one of the original establishments of safety and security in every person’s life. It satisfied an early desire for protection and territorial autonomy, and in this isolation, we achieved both comfort and control. Despite their ineffectiveness as barricades against true physical threat, forts offered an impression of self-sufficiency and power. As adults, we recognize the playful innocence in erecting these barriers, but rarely acknowledge that our fear responses have evolved very little.
By revisiting my fort-making practice in a public gallery space I hope to instill a sense of nostalgic familiarity for viewers. In addition to providing a space to relive childhood feelings of protective solitude, the public venue offers an opportunity to share those same small, restricted spaces with others, thereby redefining their seclusive function.
2016 Sheet and furniture installation
NINE, TCP exhibition at Armor Yards, Atlanta GA
In a sociopolitical climate of ever-increasing fear mongering, we are guided towards seeking protection, encouraging territorial isolation and building walls. Often times, these measures manifest in futile attempts at safeguarding against invisible threats. The indoor household fort represents one of the original establishments of safety and security in every person’s life. It satisfied an early desire for protection and territorial autonomy, and in this isolation, we achieved both comfort and control. Despite their ineffectiveness as barricades against true physical threat, forts offered an impression of self-sufficiency and power. As adults, we recognize the playful innocence in erecting these barriers, but rarely acknowledge that our fear responses have evolved very little.
By revisiting my fort-making practice in a public gallery space I hope to instill a sense of nostalgic familiarity for viewers. In addition to providing a space to relive childhood feelings of protective solitude, the public venue offers an opportunity to share those same small, restricted spaces with others, thereby redefining their seclusive function.
2016
05.02.15 Interactive sound performance
Atlanta's Cryptophonic Tour by ROAM Transmissions was a single-day sound art event designed as "a sonic exploration of Historic Oakland Cemetery’s unique aural histories". Each of the selected artists was assigned a plot in the cemetery and instructed to create a sound piece inspired by the burial site. The piece would then be played or performed on site during the five hour public self-guided cemetery tour.
I was assigned the plot of a beloved pet mockingbird, Tweet. Following his 1874 passing, Tweet was buried on the Weimer family plot alongside his family. Tweet's headstone is marked with a small carved stone lamb.
In this performance, I assumed the role of a mockingbird for the five hour duration of the event. Just as mockingbirds roam and collect environmental sounds, I traveled through the cemetery with a field recorder and minidisk recorder collecting short snippets of nature sounds, train sounds, unsuspecting conversations, other artists' sound performances, etc. I occasionally inserted recordings of various renditions of a popular 1855 song, Listen to the Mockingbird.
After 30 minutes I returned to the gravesite, where I had arranged 3 chairs for seated listening and triangulated 3 disc players and speakers installed in paper mache and lace eggs. I programed the collected sounds to loop on the speakers, as I continually changed out each disc every half hour for five hours.
The resulting piece at Tweet's gravesite established a 3-way directional sound effect with ever-changing looping samples from the day with an occasional historical song layer. Some visitors heard pieces of their own conversations from an hour ago, while others got a short preview of another installation on the opposite end of the cemetery. Like the songs of a mockingbird, these sounds constantly overlapped and changed as they narrated an exploration of the environment around us.
10.25.14 A guided tour of local piles of dirt at construction sites
A brief foreign landscape emerges while another planned space is being erected. Constructions sites, and in particular, the piles of dirt that appear overnight and often move back and forth across the site, represent an ephemeral state of creation sandwiched between two other more permanent phases of intended developed space. The liminal landscape is rarely considered, as it is short-lived and created as a means to an end - an end that erases any sign of its existence. It is in this in-between that the earthen monuments emerge, disrupting our topographic expectations. Despite fences and glossy signage promising the commerce to come, the dirt piles, however temporary, redefine the existing landscape in a way that invites curiosity and exploration. Their shape and placement ever changing, the dirt pile mimics a slow-moving mammoth beast, both comforting in familiarity and intimidating in colossal size. Often restricted by a brightly colored mesh fence, these constructed monuments loom as precious relics or exotic creatures not to be touched, but only admired as monuments from afar due to their obvious exclusivity. It is their preciousness and impeded access that breeds a need to investigate, document and traverse their fluctuating surface and placement.
10.25.14 A one-night collaborative installation with Pastiche Lumumba at MINT
Through sculptural and video projection installation, Suite Grass + Dirt Pile explores the unexpected overlooked aesthetic possibilities of altered natural landscapes.
Meta Gary: A brief foreign landscape emerges while another planned space is being erected. Constructions sites, and in particular, the piles of dirt that appear overnight and often move back and forth across the site, represent an ephemeral state of creation sandwiched between two other more permanent phases of intended developed space. The liminal landscape is rarely considered, as it is short-lived and created as a means to an end - an end that erases any sign of its existence. It is in this in-between that the earthen monuments emerge, disrupting our topographic expectations. Despite fences and glossy signage promising the commerce to come, the dirt piles, however temporary, redefine the existing landscape in a way that invites curiosity and exploration. Their shape and placement ever changing, the dirt pile mimics a slow-moving mammoth beast, both comforting in familiarity and intimidating in colossal size. Often restricted by a brightly colored mesh fence, these constructed monuments loom as precious relics or exotic creatures not to be touched, but only admired as monuments from afar due to their obvious exclusivity. It is their preciousness and impeded access that breeds a need to investigate, document and traverse their fluctuating surface and placement.
Pastiche Lumumba: Grass is a living element of our constructed environment; carpet for outside. The convention of manufacturing and grooming of grass predicates our relationship to it as an aesthetic object rather than a plant. While the saturation of grass IRL represents the supportive vitality of nature, the manipulation of these digital images calls attention to the ubiquitous state of fabrication. The compositions of natural elements, construction tools, and digital interface elements create a visual link between process utility and product aesthetic.
2012 MFA thesis exhibition at Ernest G Welch Gallery
Pedestrian is inspired by my daily walking routines and my relationship to the spaces in which I walk. Through additional instruction-guided walks with volunteers, this project examines the seemingly mundane travels of walkers and their relationship to and absorption of the space around them, and encourages a reconsideration of the environmental everyday into a venue for play and discovery. In this work, 15 participants were given the same list of instructions in which to explore Decatur, GA. Inspired by the remappings of the Situationists in 1960s Paris as well as relational artists, I created a new map of the city and then erected a physical rendering of this map in the gallery space.
