The Data collection Invites contrast of dry data with the messy intimacy of food, fluids and emotion. Data is information, and the Collection tries and fails to quantify emotion, consumption, sex.
Food, measured and allotted, translates into the space we take up in the world. Food is conduit for pleasure, connection, comfort, sustenance. Also control, and appetite. The alchemy of the ordinary. Paper stands in for abstraction, ideas, flatness, transcendence.
As a child I went on archaeological digs with my father. Tiny shards and arrowheads revealed stories that enriched the land around us. Much of my artwork imagines phenomena both seen and unseen.
What is the architecture, the symbolism of the vessel? It is a place of potential, never finalized, always filling and emptying, or going from one place to another.
Sketch book early mock up
Pseudologia is a photography book that examines the metaphysics of objects, probing the unseen and in-between spaces of daily life. The photographs are experiments highlighting unexpected relationships, playing in a zone of slippage, of excavation.
Pseudologia refers to the rare phenomena pseudologia fantastica, also known as mythomania, which is a kind of pathological lying. The title pokes fun at the artist, who lives part of the time in an alternate reality, where she “listens” to objects, mines shapes, constructing and deconstructing images in order to make them give up their secrets.
Exhibition views
Feet of clay is a project that explores several contradictory ideas at once: The weight of history, the process of creating a new self, being stuck in place and time. The contradiction of aging and growing wildly simultaneously. The raw, unfinished clay is the stuff before the statue is fixed. It is pure potential. The clay self poses as Gaia, the devouring, destructive feminine, casually eating the leg of her captor. The clay self asks: Can I bend the arc of art history? Who and what have I created of my own flesh? How strong, how fast, how brave can I be? How do I channel my rage, my power? My sexuality? How can I be free?
Clay is cold, dense, sticky and slow. It is stubbornly hard to manipulate. It must be warmed by the body, and moistened with water. Paper is fast, loose and clean. Food is conduit for pleasure, comfort, sustenance. Also an expression of control, and of appetite. Data is information, systemization, patriarchy and the status quo. Data tries and fails to quantify emotion, consumption, sex, art, history. These are my tools, the symbols and materials I am using to open up a raw new space to reimagine art, self and history.
I fell in love with the Mnemosyne Atlas and immediately saw how it meshed with my own work. At first, I only looked at it for short periods of time, letting the overwhelming inspiration flow over me in bursts. What I learned about it made it feel that it belonged to me even more. The Atlas has baffled and fascinated thinkers across disciplines and history, and deliciously, it was left unfinished by its creator, the art historian Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929). I have placed my own images into the Atlas, replacing art historical images and simultaneously creating new connections. Thus, I stepped directly into the flow of the history of images, claiming my territory among male artist ancestors.
My role in this flow of mostly Western images is as a vandal and disrupter of sexist art history, but also as a participant. I'm quoting from this history, creating a new category of images. I have staked my claim and pinned my own trauma of sexual and other patriarchal violence onto Warburg’s own traumas. Warburg was a war veteran hospitalized with mental illness before he created the Atlas. My own family is affected by the aftermath of war. I feel another kinship with Warburg -- as an artist, I also create collections of related images. Warburg was more artist than historian -- he intuitively understood image virality and tracked the migration and repetition of images from antiquity to modernity in an exploration of collective memory.
I’ve only begun my work with the Atlas. I am creating new images to fit into its panels as a hybrid historical and contemporary object, but also outside of the panels, in relation to art history, feminism and my personal history. The only panel included here is Panel 48, which relates to the Roman Goddess Fortuna, and the theme of self liberation, and it is a work still in progress.
